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ABSTRACT
To enable the successful deployment of multi-robot
systems (MRS), effective coordination mechanisms must
be designed in a principled manner. There is
currently little formal work addressing how to design
such coordination mechanisms nor is there a formal
understanding of the capabilities and performance
characteristics that can be expected of various
coordination mechanisms in a given task domain. We
address this problem by presenting a formal framework
from which to discuss and reason about coordination in
a MRS and use this formalism to develop a method by
which to automatically construct individual robot
controllers in a MRS for a given task where the robots
have the capability for inter-robot communication but
maintain no non-transient state. We present a graph
coloring approach to determine the minimal number of
unique communication messages necessary such that the
task is correctly executed. Understanding the
capabilities and limitations of a MRS composed of such
robots contributes to the understanding of when and
why inter-robot communication is necessary to achieve
the desired coordination and when it is not
sufficient. We validate our automatic controller
construction method in a simulated multi-robot
construction domain.
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