Resiliency Through Collaboration in Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems

This paper examines pairwise collaborations in heterogeneous multi-robot systems. In particular, we focus on how individual robots, with different functionalities and dynamics, can enhance their resilience by forming collaborative arrangements that result in new capabilities. Control barrier functions are utilized as a mechanism to encode the safe operating regions of individual robots, with the idea being that a robot may be able to operate in new regions that it could not traverse alone by working with other robots. We explore answers to three questions: “Why should robots collaborate?”, “When should robots collaborate?”, and “How can robots collaborate?” To that end, we introduce the safely reachable set – capturing the regions that individual robots can reach safely, either with or without help, while considering their initial states and dynamics. We then describe the conditions under which a help-providing robot and a help-receiving robot can engage in collaboration. Next, we describe the pairwise collaboration framework, modeled through hybrid automata, to show how collaborations can be structured within a heterogeneous multi-robot team. Finally, we present case studies that are conducted on a team of mobile robots.