Coordinated deployment of multiple heterogeneous robots.

R. Simmons, D. Apfelbaum, D. Fox, R.P. Goldmann, K.Z. Haigh, D.J. Musliner, M. Pelican, and S. Thrun.

To be truly useful, mobile robots need to be fairly autonomous and easy to control. This is especially true in situations where multiple robots are used, due to the increase in sensory information and the fact that the robots can interfere with one another. This paper describes a system that integrates autonomous navigation, a task executive, task planning, and an intuitive graphical user interface to control multiple, heterogeneous robots. We have demonstrated a prototype system that plans and coordinates the deployment of teams of robots. Testing has shown the effectiveness and robustness of the system, and of the coordination strategies in particular.

The full paper is available in PDF and gzipped Postscript

@INPROCEEDINGS{Simmons00b,
  AUTHOR	= {Simmons, R. and Apfelbaum, D. and Fox, D. and Goldmann, R.P. and Haigh, K.Z. and Musliner, D.J. and Pelican, M. and Thrun, S.},
  TITLE		= {Coordinated Deployment of Multiple Heterogeneous Robots},
  YEAR		= {2000},
  BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)}
}