Analyzing teams of cooperating mobile robots

Donald (1993) described a manipulation task for cooperating mobile robots that can push large, heavy objects. There, the author asked whether explicit local and global communication between the agents can be removed from a family of pushing protocols. In this paper, the authors answer in the affirmative. They do so by using the general methods of Donald for analyzing information invariants. The authors discuss several measures for the information complexity of the task of pushing with cooperating mobile robots, and they present a methodology for creating new manipulation strategies out of existing ones. The authors develop and analyze synchronous and asynchronous manipulation protocols for a small team of cooperating mobile robots than can push large boxes. The protocols described have been implemented in several forms on the Cornell mobile robots in the authors´ laboratory