Communication Complexity of Multi-robot Systems

We examine the scalability of multi-robot algorithms. In particular, we attempt to capture the idea that the less coordination a multi-robot system requires, the better it should scale to large numbers of robots. To that end, we introduce a notion of communication complexity of multi-robot (or more generally, distributed control) systems as a surrogate for coordination. We describe a formalism, called CCL, for specifying multi-robot systems and algorithms for which the definition of communication complexity arises naturally. We then analyze the communication complexity of several, in some cases novel, multi-robot communication schemes each representative of one of several natural complexity classes.