Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems

Abstract

The mechanical characteristics and functionalities of individual robots in a collective symbiotic system are of the utmost importance in order to confer suitable capabilities to the symbiotic robot organisms. However, this does not necessarily mean that the design of individual robots has to be particularly complex from a mechanical point of view. On the contrary, excessive complexity can lead to several disadvantages in the assembled state of the organism, e.g. higher risk of failures and higher electrical and computational power demand. In addition, considering the manufacturing phase of the individual robots themselves, complexity would lead to high development and assembling costs; this is an issue particularly relevant when a large multi-agent symbiotic system is targeted. Finally, considering miniaturized robots, there are severe volume constraints at the design level that may prevent the possibility to integrate complex mechanisms. Consequently, as a rule of thumb, the individual robots of a large collective symbiotic system can be designed to offer the minimal mechanical functionalities able to allow the symbiotic robotic organism to assemble and develop all those collective configurations and reconfiguration strategies that let specific collective functionalities emerge. That’s inevitably a compromise choice in the design.