Collaborative Robotics Design Considerations

As research advances individual robot capabilities, a logical progression is the use of multiple robots to complete a task more effectively. Mission performance can be improved by the ability to allocate robots with diverse capabilities to perform different parts of a complex task. To paraphrase [[10], there are many advantages to enabling robotic collaborative technologies: probability of task completion, completion speed, task precision, optimized functional allocation, collaborative localization, robustness and diversity of solution. In previous work, the authors conducted independent literature surveys of multi-robot research, using two different approaches. Both found the under1ying research to be categorized within some common sub-disciplines. This paper consolidates findings from the two surveys, presents insights gained from the two different survey methods, and recommends approaches for future research into multi-robot syStems.