Collaboration in Multi-Robot Systems: Taxonomy and Survey over Frameworks for Collaboration

TL;DR

This paper clarifies the distinctions among cooperation, coordination, and collaboration in multi-robot systems, proposes a taxonomy, reviews existing frameworks, and discusses future research directions for enhancing collaborative capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a clear taxonomy differentiating key concepts and reviews various frameworks, addressing terminology inconsistencies in multi-robot collaboration research.

Findings

Provides formal definitions for cooperation, coordination, and collaboration.

Reviews existing frameworks for collaborative multi-robot systems.

Identifies technical challenges and future research directions.

Abstract

Collaboration is a central theme in multi-robot systems as tasks and demands increasingly require capabilities that go beyond what any one individual robot possesses. Yet, despite extensive work on cooperative control and coordinated behaviors, the terminology surrounding collective multi-robot interaction remains inconsistent across research communities. In particular, cooperation, coordination, and collaboration are often treated interchangeably, without clearly articulating the differences among them. To address this gap, we propose definitions that distinguish and relate cooperation, coordination, and collaboration in multi-robot systems, highlighting the support of new capabilities in collaborative behaviors, and illustrate these concepts through representative examples. Building on this taxonomy, different frameworks for collaboration are reviewed, and technical challenges and promising future research directions are identified for collaborative multi-robot systems.