Designing Robot Teams for Distributed Construction, Repair, and Maintenance

Designing teams of autonomous robots that can create target structures or repair damage to those structures on either a one-off or ongoing basis is an important problem in distributed robotics. However, it is not known if a team design algorithm for any of these tasks can both have low runtime and produce teams that will always perform their specified tasks quickly and correctly. In this article, we give the first computational and parameterized complexity analyses of several robot team design problems associated with creating, repairing, and maintaining target structures in given environments. Our goals are to establish whether efficient design algorithms exist that operate reliably on all possible inputs and, if not, under which restrictions such algorithms are and are not possible. We prove that all of our design problems are not efficiently solvable in general for heterogeneous robot teams and remain so under a number of plausible restrictions on robot controllers, environments, and target structures. We also give the first restrictions relative to which some of these problems may be efficiently solvable and discuss how theoretical results like those derived here can be combined with physical experiments to derive the best possible algorithms for real-world robot team design.