Group-based control of large-scale micro-robot swarms with on-board Physical Finite-State Machines
Abstract
An important problem in microrobotics is how to control a large group of microrobots with a global control signal. This paper focuses on controlling a large-scale swarm of MicroStressBots with on-board physical finite-state machines. We introduce the concept of group-based control, which makes it possible to scale up the swarm size while reducing the complexity both of robot fabrication as well as swarm control. We prove that the group-based control system is locally accessible in terms of the robot positions. We further hypothesize based on extensive simulations that the system is globally controllable. A nonlinear optimization strategy is proposed to control the swarm by minimizing control effort. We also propose a probabilistically complete collision avoidance method that is suitable for online use. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the proposed methods in simulations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2208.08614,
title = {Group-based control of large-scale micro-robot swarms with on-board Physical Finite-State Machines},
author = {Siyu Li and Milos Zefran and Igor Paprotny},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.08614},
year = {2022}
}