  Quantiles of a natural phenomena can provide scientists with an important
understanding of different spreads of concentrations. When there are several
available robots, it may be advantageous to pool resources in a collaborative
way to improve performance. A multirobot team can be difficult to practically
bring together and coordinate. To this end, we present a study across several
axes of the impact of using multiple robots to estimate quantiles of a
distribution of interest using an informative path planning formulation. We
measure quantile estimation accuracy with increasing team size to understand
what benefits result from a multirobot approach in a drone exploration task of
analyzing the algae concentration in lakes. We additionally perform an analysis
on several parameters, including the spread of robot initial positions, the
planning budget, and inter-robot communication, and find that while using more
robots generally results in lower estimation error, this benefit is achieved
under certain conditions. We present our findings in the context of real field
robotic applications and discuss the implications of the results and
interesting directions for future work.
