Towards a Multi-Robot Coordination Formalism

Coordination is an essential characteristic of any task-achieving multi-robot system, whether it is accomplished through an explicit or implicit coordination mechanism. There is little formal work addressing how various coordination mechanisms are related, how appropriate they are for a given task, what capabilities they require of the robots, and what level of performance they can be expected to provide. Given a multi-robot system composed of homogeneous robots, we present a method for automated controller construction such that the resulting controller makes use of internal state and no explicit inter-robot communication, yet is still capable of correctly executing a given task. Understanding the capabilities and limitations of a multi-robot system composed of robots not capable of inter-robot communication contributes to the understanding of when and why inter-robot communication becomes necessary and when internal state alone is sufficient to achieve the desired coordination. We validate our method in a multi-robot construction domain.