A review on multi-robot systems categorised by application domain

Literature reviews on Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) typically focus on fundamental technical aspects, like coordination and communication, that need to be considered in order to coordinate a team of robots to perform a given task effectively and efficiently. Other reviews only consider works that aim to address a specific problem or one particular application of MRS. In contrast, this paper presents a survey of recent research works on MRS and categorises them according to their application domain. Furthermore, this paper compiles a number of seminal review works that have proposed specific taxonomies in classifying fundamental concepts, such as coordination, architecture and communication, in the field of MRS.peer-reviewe

Supervisory Control of Multiple Robots through Group Communication

Single-human supervision of collaborative sem-iautonomous multi-robot teams is recently getting the attention of the robotic community. In this context, the adoption of a growing number of robots does not necessarily produce a gain in performance, due to the increased workload of the human supervisor. However, enabling human operators to communicate with groups of robots can reduce the operators’ effort in guiding the team. Here, group communicating is intended not only to assign a task to a group but also as a way to identify the group members. This is particularly relevant in proximate interactions or in the necessity of freeing operator’s hands. In this work, starting from an analysis of real human utterances in selecting groups of robots, we extracted the features that are useful to define a basic vocabulary and analysed the single robot needed awareness about its own characteristics and those of the robots in the neighborhood. Such analysis is used to develop a semi-autonomous multi-robot simulated environment, where a human operator can guide groups of robots. The simulated environment is used to measure the humans’ interaction effort and the task effectiveness while increasing the number of robots involved in a joint task, in the two cases where the commands are issued towards single or grouped robots