Distributed Algorithms for Cooperative Mobile Robots: A Survey

Continuous advances in technology have made possible the use of several robots in order to carry out a large variety of cooperative tasks that are dangerous or undesirable for humans to complete. Nevertheless, merely bringing robots together is by no means sufficient, and adequate coordination mechanisms must be designed to ensure coherent group behavior. Furthermore, since many applications of cooperative robotics consider cheap robots dwelling in hazardous environments, fault-tolerance is of primary concern. As a result, research on mechanisms and algorithms for coordination and self-organization of mobile robot systems has attracted considerable attention. In particular, many researches have addressed the problem from a computational view point (also called algorithmic approach), aiming to understand the fundamental algorithmic limitations of what a group of weak mobile robots can or can not achieve. In this paper, we give a survey of these existing researches, and emphasize the various theoretical issues that arise in coordinating a set of autonomous mobile robots in the plane, and from algorithmic perspective. Finally, we discuss open problems in this field.