Reduction and nonlinear controllability of symmetric distributed robotic systems with drift

This paper considers the "reduction" problem for distributed robotic systems. In particular, controllability of systems containing multiple instances of identical robotic systems or components where the overall system is invariant with respect. to interchanging these identical robots or components is considered. The main result is a proposition which shows that for an equivalence class of symmetric systems of this type, controllability of the entire class of systems can be determined by analyzing the smallest member of the equivalence class.