Quantitative and qualitative coordination for multi-robot systems

Abstract

Coordination takes the role of integrating a set of individual robots into a whole multi-robot system to accompany tasks. During the past two decades, lots of achievements for the coordination of multi-robot systems were made. In this paper, these results were reviewed from two aspects. The first is from the point of view of that coordinated strategies were generated automatically by mathematical approaches, and the second is from the point of view that coordinated strategies were designed by control engineers. The approaches for generating and describing coordinated strategies are summarized, respectively. The potential future work was discussed especially for the case the goal of exploration is modeling an unknown indoor environment. It was pointed out that a few of coordinated behaviors can be realized by both of quantitative and qualitative approaches. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.