Active Exploitation of Redundancies in Reconfigurable Multi-Robot Systems

While traditional robotic systems come with a monolithic system design, reconfigurable multi-robot systems can share and shift physical resources in an on-demand fashion. Multi-robot operations can benefit from this flexibility by actively managing system redundancies depending on current tasks and having more options to respond to failure events. To support this active exploitation of redundancies in robotic systems, this paper details an organization model as basis for planning with reconfigurable multi-robot systems. The model allows to exploit redundancies when optimizing a multi-robot system's probability of survival with respect to a desired mission. The resulting planning approach trades safety against efficiency in robotic operations and thereby offers a new perspective and tool to design and improve multi-robot missions. We use a simulated multi-robot planetary exploration mission to evaluate this approach and highlight an exemplary performance landscape.