On the role and opportunities in teamwork design for advanced multi-robot search systems

Abstract

Intelligent robotic systems are becoming ever more present in our lives across a multitude of domains such as industry, transportation, agriculture, security, healthcare and even education. Such systems enable humans to focus on the interesting and sophisticated tasks while robots accomplish tasks that are either too tedious, routine or potentially dangerous for humans to do. Recent advances in perception technologies and accompanying hardware, mainly attributed to rapid advancements in the deep-learning ecosystem, enable the deployment of robotic systems equipped with onboard sensors as well as the computational power to perform autonomous reasoning and decision making online. While there has been significant progress in expanding the capabilities of single and multi-robot systems during the last decades across a multitude of domains and applications, there are still many promising areas for research that can advance the state of cooperative searching systems that employ multiple robots. In this article, several prospective avenues of research in teamwork cooperation with considerable potential for advancement of multi-robot search systems will be visited and discussed. In previous works we have shown that multi-agent search tasks can greatly benefit from intelligent cooperation between team members and can achieve performance close to the theoretical optimum. The techniques applied can be used in a variety of domains including planning against adversarial opponents, control of forest fires and coordinating search-and-rescue missions. The state-of-the-art on methods of multi-robot search across several selected domains of application is explained, highlighting the pros and cons of each method, providing an up-to-date view on the current state of the domains and their future challenges.