ABSTRACT
Distributed robotic systems require a new design philosophy. Tradi tional robots are designed with a broad array of capabilities (sensing, ac tuation, communication, and computation). Often, the designers will even add redundant components to avoid system failure from a single fault. The resulting systems are large, complex, and expensive. For robot teams, the design can be approached from a completely different angle, namely: “Build simple, inexpensive robots with limited capabilities that can accomplish the task reliably through cooperation.” Each individual robot may not be very
capable, but as a team they can still accomplish useful tasks. This results in less expensive robots that are easier to maintain and debug. Moreover, since each robot is expendable, reliability can be obtained in numbers; that is, if a single robot fails, little if any capabilities are lost, and the team can still continue the task with the remaining robots. Because the size of a robot determines, to a large extent, its capabilities, we are developing a hierarchical robot team at Carnegie Mellon University. As is shown in Figure 10.1, the team consists of large All Terrain Vehicles (ATVs) [111] [113], medium-sized Tank robots (based on a remote con trol Tamiya tank model) [89], a set of Pioneer robots and centimeter scale millibots ( 7 x 7 x 7 cm).
