Cooperative Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems: A Survey

The emergence of the Internet of things and the widespread deployment of diverse computing systems have led to the formation of heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MAS) to complete a variety of tasks. Motivated to highlight the state of the art on existing MAS while identifying their limitations, remaining challenges, and possible future directions, we survey recent contributions to the field. We focus on robot agents and emphasize the challenges of MAS sub-fields including task decomposition, coalition formation, task allocation, perception, and multi-agent planning and control. While some components have seen more advancements than others, more research is required before effective autonomous MAS can be deployed in real smart city settings that are less restrictive than the assumed validation environments of MAS. Specifically, more autonomous end-to-end solutions need to be experimentally tested and developed while incorporating natural language ontology and dictionaries to automate complex task decomposition and leveraging big data advancements to improve perception algorithms for robotics.