Exploiting redundancy to implement multiobjective behavior

Teams of robots can be redundant with respect to a given task. This redundancy can be exploited to pursue additional objectives during the execution of the task. In this paper, we describe a control-based method to exploit such redundancy for the execution of additional behavior, leading to the improvement of overall performance. The control-based method provides a suitable mechanism for combining controllers with different objectives. The mechanism ensures that the subordinate controllers do not interfere with the superior controllers. Thus it allows to build controllers exhibiting complex behavior from simple primitives, while maintaining their provable performance characteristics. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated by experiments with a multi-robot exploration task.