Beyond Robustness: A Taxonomy of Approaches towards Resilient Multi-Robot Systems
Amanda Prorok, Matthew Malencia, Luca Carlone, Gaurav S. Sukhatme,, Brian M. Sadler, Vijay Kumar

TL;DR
This paper surveys how resilience is achieved in multi-robot systems, emphasizing system-wide diversity and reconfiguration to endure and recover from unexpected disruptions, and introduces a formal taxonomy of approaches.
Contribution
It provides a formal taxonomy of resilience approaches in multi-robot systems and discusses how to define, measure, and achieve resilience across robotics domains.
Findings
Resilience involves system diversity, redundancy, and reconfiguration.
A formal taxonomy categorizes different resilience strategies.
Identifies open problems for future research in resilient robotics.
Abstract
Robustness is key to engineering, automation, and science as a whole. However, the property of robustness is often underpinned by costly requirements such as over-provisioning, known uncertainty and predictive models, and known adversaries. These conditions are idealistic, and often not satisfiable. Resilience on the other hand is the capability to endure unexpected disruptions, to recover swiftly from negative events, and bounce back to normality. In this survey article, we analyze how resilience is achieved in networks of agents and multi-robot systems that are able to overcome adversity by leveraging system-wide complementarity, diversity, and redundancy - often involving a reconfiguration of robotic capabilities to provide some key ability that was not present in the system a priori. As society increasingly depends on connected automated systems to provide key infrastructure…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsReinforcement Learning in Robotics · Optimization and Search Problems · Smart Grid Security and Resilience
