A Survey of Research on Control of Teams of Small Robots in Military Operations

Abstract

While a number of excellent review articles on military robots have appeared in existing literature, this paper focuses on a distinct sub-space of related problems: small military robots organized into moderately sized squads, operating in a ground combat environment. Specifically, we consider the following: - Command of practical small robots, comparable to current generation, small unmanned ground vehicles (e.g., PackBots) with limited computing and sensor payload, as opposed to larger vehicle-sized robots or micro-scale robots; - Utilization of moderately sized practical forces of 3-10 robots applicable to currently envisioned military ground operations; - Complex three-dimensional physical environments, such as urban areas or mountainous terrains and the inherent difficulties they impose, including limited and variable fields of observation, difficult navigation, and intermittent communication; - Adversarial environments where the active, intelligent enemy is the key consideration in determining the behavior of the robotic force; and - Purposeful, partly autonomous, coordinated behaviors that are necessary for such a robotic force to survive and complete missions; these are far more complex than, for example, formation control or field coverage behavior.