Robotics Center research on multirobot systems and swarms explores how a team of robots can work together to accomplish a task in a distributed manner. Teams can be homogenous, meaning multiple copies of the same robot, or heterogeneous, such as ground and aerial robots working together. Teams can be highly coordinated or fully decentralized. Research in multiagent systems and swarms includes understanding multi-vehicle coordination and path planning, discovering and analyzing emergent behaviors, and understanding and improving human interactions with robot teams. At the microscale, research typically involves exploring how swarms of heterogenous or homogeneous microrobots respond to a common actuation command.
