Abstract

We demonstrate the effectiveness of behavior-based control in facilitating the development and evaluation of multirobot controllers that are: (1) robust to robot failures, and (2) easily modified to facilitate development of the controller variation that sufficiently satisfies the design requirements for the task. Our experimental focus here is distributed multirobot collection, a class of tasks that includes de-mining and toxic waste clean-up. We demonstrate a basic multi-robot controller for the collection task, then show how to easily derive two spatio-temporal variations with markedly different performance properties. We evaluate the desirability of these controllers with respect to design requirements involving inter-robot interference, time-to-completion, and energy expenditure. The data for evaluation come from experiments using four physical mobile robots performing the three variations of the collection task.

Citations