Mission Reliability Estimation for Multirobot Team Design - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Mission Reliability Estimation for Multirobot Team Design

Stephen B. Stancliff, John M. Dolan, and Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu
Conference Paper, Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 2206 - 2211, October, 2006

Abstract

One reason given for the use of multirobot systems is that many cheap robots are more reliable than one expensive robot. To date, however, there has been no quantitative analysis to support this assertion. This paper presents the first quantitative support for the argument that larger teams of less-reliable robots can perform certain missions more reliably than smaller teams of more-reliable robots. Our results show that for short missions, in fact, a team of four robots can provide greater mission reliability than a team of two robots, even when the individual robots in the team of four have reliability that is an order of magnitude lower. These results suggest that considerable cost reductions can be achieved for some missions by choosing larger teams of less-reliable robots over smaller teams of more-reliable robots.

BibTeX

@conference{Stancliff-2006-9594,
author = {Stephen B. Stancliff and John M. Dolan and Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu},
title = {Mission Reliability Estimation for Multirobot Team Design},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
year = {2006},
month = {October},
pages = {2206 - 2211},
keywords = {Mobile robots, multirobot systems, mission design, reliability.},
}