ABSTRACT
As robots become more autonomous and sophisticated, they are being used increasingly for more complex and demanding tasks. Often, single robots are insufficient to perform the tasks. For some types of tasks, such as exploration or de-mining, multiple robots can be used to increase efficiency and reliability. For many other tasks, however, not only are multiple robots necessary, but explicit coordination amongst the robots is imperative. Our research focus is on the latter class of problems, particularly those in which the individual robots have vastly different capabilities. For many tasks, the use of heterogeneous robots is indicated because of the difficulties of constructing a single robot that has the needed size, strength, dexterity, etc.
