On cooperation in a multi robot society for space exploration

Abstract

Robot cooperation is a recently emerging field in robotics that aims for versatility, adaptability, robustness and low cost and is therefore of interest in various application areas. This paper tries to describe multi robot societies and how they may be useful in space exploration. Building on various simulation and theoretical results, a simple multi robot society (SMURFS) was built and used to test some of multi robot cooperation and reconfiguration algorithms. We outline future extensions currently in the works and our vision for the next iterations of the SMURFS society.