Territorial multi-robot task division

This work demonstrates the application of the distributed behavior-based approach [1] to generating a multi-robot controller for a group of mobile robots performing a clean-up and collection task. The paper studies a territorial approach to the task in which the robots are assigned individual territories that can be dynamically resized if one of the robots malfunctions, permitting the completion of the task. The described controller is implemented on a group of four IS Robotics R2e mobile robots. Using a collection of experimental robot data, we empirically derive and demonstrate most effective foraging in our domain, and show the decline of performance of the space division strategy with increased group size.