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ABSTRACT
To enable the successful deployment of task-achieving multi-robot
systems (MRS), coordination mechanisms must be utilized in order to
effectively mediate the interactions between the robots and the
task environment. Over the past decade, there have been a number of
elegant experimentally demonstrated MRS coordination mechanisms.
Most of these mechanisms have been task-specific in nature, typically
providing only empirical insights into coordination design and little
in the way of systematic techniques to assist in the design of
coordinated MRS for new task domains. To fully realize the
potentials of MRS, formally-grounded systematic techniques amenable
to analysis are needed in order to facilitate the design of
coordinated MRS. We address this problem by presenting a formal
framework for describing and reasoning about coordination in a MRS.
Using this principled foundation, we are developing a suite
of general methods for automatically synthesizing the controllers of
robots constituting a MRS such that the given task is performed in a
coordinated fashion. This paper presents a method for the automatic
synthesis of a specific type of controller, one that is stateless but
capable of inter-robot communication. We also present a graph
coloring-based approach for minimizing the number of necessary unique
communication messages. The synthesis of such communicative
controllers provides a means for assessing the uses and limitations
of communication in MRS coordination. We present experimental
validation of our formal approach of controller synthesis in a
multi-robot construction domain through physically-realistic
simulations and in real-robot demonstrations.
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