Multi-robot team design for real-world applications

摘要

Many of these applications are in dynamic environments requiring capabilities distributed in functionality, space, or time, and therefore often require teams of robots to work together. While much research has been done in recent years, current robotics technology is still far from achieving many of the real world applications. Two primary reasons for this technology gap are that (1) previous work has not adequately addressed the issues of fault tolerance and adaptivity in multi-robot teams, and (2) existing robotics research is often geared at specific applications and is not easily generalized to different, but related, applications. This paper addresses these issues by first describing the design issues of key importance in these real-world cooperative robotics applications: fault tolerance, reliability, adaptivity, and coherence. We then present a general architecture addressing these design issues (called ALLIANCE) that facilities multi-robot cooperation of small- to medium-sized teams in dynamic environments, performing missions composed of loosely coupled subtasks. We illustrate an implementation of ALLIANCE in a real-world application, called Bounding Overwatch, and then discuss how this architecture addresses our key design issues.