ABSTRACT
The last decade has seen an explosion of research [154, 13, 37, 255, 296, 354, 488] in robot groups largely focused on architectural issues for robot control and coordination. However, heterogeneous robot groups have not been studied in much detail; this chapter describes most of the current research activity in this area. We consider a robot group to be heteroge neous if at least one member of the group is different from the others in one or more of the following attributes: 1) mechanics, 2) sensing, 3) com puting hardware, or 4) nature of on-board computation. The system we describe in this chapter meets all four criteria. For a systematic analysis and metrics of robot group diversity the reader is referred to [34]. Our experimental testbed (shown in Figure 12.1) is composed of a robot he licopter and two mobile ground robots, thus making it a morphologically heterogeneous group.
