Principled Approaches to the Design of Multi-Robot Systems

Coordinated multi-robot systems (MRS) have been successfully demonstrated in a variety of task domains. However, the design of these systems is typically ad hoc and centered around resource-intensive trial-and-error design processes. To fully exploit the power and potentials of MRS, the community is in need of additional principled design methodologies. In this paper, we present an overview of our ongoing work on three different principled methodologies, each of which addresses a different type of MRS, based on the scale of the system or mechanisms by which coordination is achieved. First, we present a formal study and analysis of task allocation in MRS, including a domain-independent taxonomy of multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) problems. Second, we present a principled controller design methodology for MRS executing sequential tasks. This design methodology provides a formal framework which serves as the foundation for an integrated set of systematic MRS controller synthesis and analysis methods. Third, we discuss the application of a formal analytical approach to the study of large-scale MRS motivated by work from the physics community. Through the use of principled methods such as these, we hope to provide a formal footing for the design of MRS.