Path planning for optimizing survivability of multi-robot formation in adversarial environments

Multi robot formation is a canonical problem in robotic research. The problem has been examined in neutral environments, where the robots´ goal is usually to maintain the formation despite changes in the environment. The problem of multi robot formation has been motivated by natural phenomena such as schools of fish or flocks of birds. While in the natural phenomena the team behavior is responsive to threats, in robotics research of team formation, adversarial presence has been ignored. In this paper we present the problem of adversarial formation, in which a team of robots travels in a connected formation through an adversarial environment that includes threats that may harm the robots. The robots´ goal is, therefore, to maximize their chance of traveling through the environment unharmed, where the formation may be used as a mean to achieve this goal. We formally define the problem, present a quantitative measure for evaluating the survivability of the team, and suggest possible solutions to a variant of the problem under certain threat characteristics, optimizing different team survivability criteria. Finally, we discuss the challenges raised by transitioning the discrete representation to a continuous environment in simulation.