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ABSTRACT
Coordination is an essential characteristic of any system, either natural or
artificial, that is composed of multiple interacting agents. The mechanism by
which the coordination is achieved determines such properties as how robust the
system is to environmental perturbations, how efficient it is in performing a
given task, and, more generally, what types of coordinated tasks can be
achieved. A formal understanding of these issues will permit more focused
analysis of coordinated natural systems and more effective approaches to the
design of coordinated artificial systems. Toward this end, we are
systematically investigating coordination in the context of multi-robot
systems. We present a formal framework for multi-robot system (MRS)
coordination and use it to discuss and reason about coordination. Using this
principled foundation, we are developing a suite of general methods by which to
automatically synthesize controllers for robots constituting a MRS such that a
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 retains
some internal state (e.g., memory of past occurrences) but is not capable of
communication. Understanding the capabilities and limitations of a coordinated
system composed of individual agents with such properties contributes to the
understanding of when memory alone is sufficient to achieve the desired
coordination and when other capabilities, such as communication, may be
necessary. We validate our formal approach to the study of coordination in a
multi-robot construction task domain through the use of both
physically-realistic simulations and real-robot demonstrations.
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