Moving furniture with teams of autonomous robots

We wish to organize furniture in a room with a team of robots that can push objects. We show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then we ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects. We answer in the negative and present, as witnesses, four cooperative manipulation protocols that use diierent amount of state, sensing, and communication. We analyze these protocols in the information invariant framework. We formalize the notion of resource tradeoos for robot protocols and give the trade-oos for the speciic protocols discussed here.