Coordinating complex behaviors between hundreds of robots: A new approach to designing motion plans for multiple robots grows

In a building several stories tall with numerous rooms, hundreds of obstacles and thousands of places to inspect, the several dozen robots move as one cohesive unit. They spread out in a search pattern to thoroughly check the entire building while simultaneously splitting tasks so as to not waste time doubling back on their own paths or re-checking places other robots have already visited. Such cohesion would be difficult for human controllers to achieve, let alone for an artificial controller to compute in real-time. "If a control problem has three or four robots that live in a world with only a handful of rooms, and if the collaborative task is specified by simple logic rules, there are state-of-the-art tools that can compute an optimal solution that satisfies the task in a reasonable amount of time," said Michael M. Zavlanos, the Mary Milus Yoh and Harold L. Yoh, Jr. Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University. "And if you don't care about the best solution possible, you can solve for a few more rooms and more complex tasks in a matter of minutes, but still only a dozen robots tops," Zavlanos said.