Implementation and evaluation of a reactive multi-robot system

This paper presents the implementation of an experimental setup to study the behavior of a group of purely reactive mobile robots subject to serious unrecoverable failures: some of them have lost mobility, others have lost infrared vision. To survive, each robot must reach a supply center. The eventually degraded mission uses complementary capabilities of the two types of robots by letting a blind robot, meeting by chance an invalid one, carry it. The latter is able to "see" a supply center within a wide range. The hardware and software of the experimental devices are described, using very simple and low-cost components. Experiments are run with the robots in different initial positions. The results are compared to those obtained by many computer simulations and by a Markovian process model, both are also described.