THE EFFECT OF HETEROGENEITY IN TEAMS OF 100+ MOBILE ROBOTS

In mid-2002, a new project was begun as part of DARPA/IPTO’s Software for Distributed Robotics (SDR) Program, aimed at the practical implementation of a team of 100+ heterogeneous mobile robots in an indoor surveillance and reconnaissance task. The overall project involves the collaboration of Science Applications International Corporation (the lead organization), the University of Tennessee, the University of Southern California, and Telcordia Technologies, Inc. This paper focuses on one aspect of this project – the impact of heterogeneity in the development of scalable cooperative control approaches enabling large numbers of robots to collaborate. The robots on this team are heterogeneous by design, particularly in their sensing capabilities, with the result that no single type of robot on this team would be able to accomplish the entire mission, even if that robot type were duplicated 100 times. This approach enables expensive sensors to be distributed across a few of the robots, rather than requiring all robots to share a similar sensor suite. The result is the expected ability to accomplish the task with a high degree of flexibility and fault tolerance, but with a more extensive requirement for heterogeneous cooperation. This paper, which describes a work in progress, discusses the impact of heterogeneity in developing cooperative sensing and control capabilities for teams of 100+ robots.