On the need for a coordination mechanism to guarantee task completion in a cooperative team

To design good cooperative team members in robotics it is important to know what coordination mechanisms are required. Our approach to explore the need for a coordination mechanism is based on a systematic methodology to identify team coordination requirements. We show that a team combined of robots that each individually can solve a task not always is able to guarantee task completion as a team. In these cases some mechanism for coordination is required and we formally identify various problem classes that impose different requirements. We introduce a formal task model and distinguish between no, implicit and explicit coordination mechanisms. This model is used to study which mechanisms guarantee task completion. It allows us to prove some empirical findings reported in the literature such as that a simple foraging task does not require coordination.