ABSTRACT
The advantages that the use of different robots bring to a heteroge neous team of robots come at a price: different design, manufacturing, maintenance, and programming for each robot, which translates into costs. These costs can be related to the cost of making the robot functional (the individual cost) and the cost of making the robot a part of the team (the team cost). The individual cost is the cost of designing and manufacturing the robot and writing the software necessary to control it. The team cost is the cost of maintaining the robot and writing the software necessary to use it as part of the team. It is possible for the team cost to include also design and manufacturing costs if, from the beginning, the robot is con ceived as part of a team. However, this is usually not the case. Instead, heterogeneous teams of robots are usually formed by selecting robots with
particular characteristics from different vendors. This procedure reduces the cost of adding a robot to a heterogeneous team because the individual cost is divided among all the customers of the vendor that buy this same robot. With respect to the team cost, maintenance of the different robots is unavoidable. However, there have been large advances in reducing the costs of programming a heterogeneous team. These advances are usually based on an interface to the individual robots that isolates the particulars of each robot from the generalities of a task. For example, different robots might move forward in different ways (crawling, legged locomotion, wheels, etc.) but regardless of their particular locomotion capabilities, the act of moving forward is the same for all. Hence, a command to move forward could be sent to interfaces particular to each robot that translate the task of moving forward to the particular locomotion task, in effect, isolating general high-level tasks from particular low-level control functions.
