ABSTRACT
Additional design requirements for the controller arise from the funda mental, constrained resources of the system, including energy, time, and the number of robots. Untethered mobile robots are generally powered by batteries and can only perform a limited amount of work before needing recharging. Minimizing energy utilization is thus often required in domains, such as space exploration, where recharging is expensive, difficult, or time consuming. In time-critical domains, such as search and rescue, the
requirement is for expedient execution of the task. Additionally, regard less of the domain, the fragility of the robots may require the controller to maintain both robot-object and inter-robot collisions at a minimum.
