I gave a keynote on “Multi-Robot Coordination” at the 16th International Workshop on Wireless Sensing and Actuating Robotic Networks (WISARN 2023) on May 20, 2023.

Abstract

Now that robots have evolved from bulky platforms to agile devices, a challenge is to combine multiple robots into an integrated autonomous system, offering functionality that individual robots cannot achieve. A key building block for this integration is coordination, which is concerned with sharing knowledge, joint decision making, and allocation of computation tasks to processing nodes. Different levels of coordination exist—ranging from high-level functions, like the assignment of system-wide tasks and resources, down to low-level control, like collision avoidance, flight formations, and joint sensor usage for state estimation.

In this talk, I will present different coordination techniques for multi-robot systems, discuss their usage in prototypical multi-robot applications such as path planning, swarming and surveillance, and demonstrate deployments in unmanned aerial vehicles.