A comparative study between centralized, market-based, and behavioral multirobot coordination approaches

This paper presents a comparative study between three multirobot coordination schemes that span the spectrum of coordination approaches; a fully centralized approach that can produce optimal solutions, a fully distributed behavioral approach with minimal planned interaction between robots, and a market approach which sits in the middle of the spectrum. Several dimensions for comparison are proposed based on characteristics identified as important to multirobot application domains. Furthermore, simulation results are presented for comparisons along two of the suggested dimension: Number of robots in the team and Heterogeneity of the team. Results spanning different team sizes indicate that the market method compares favorably to the optimal solutions generated by the centralized approach in terms of cost, and compares favorably to the behavioral method in terms of computation time. All three methods are able to improve global cost by accounting for the heterogeneity of the robot team.