Related papers: Steering a Particle Swarm Using Global Inputs and …
Micro- and nanorobotics have the potential to revolutionize many applications including targeted material delivery, assembly, and surgery. The same properties that promise breakthrough solutions---small size and large populations---present…
We present a method for the control of robot swarms using two subsets of robots: a larger group of simple, oblivious robots (which we call the workers) that is governed by simple local attraction forces, and a smaller group (the guides)…
This paper investigates efficient techniques to collect and concentrate an under-actuated particle swarm despite obstacles. Concentrating a swarm of particles is of critical importance in health-care for targeted drug delivery, where…
Consider a swarm of particles controlled by global inputs. This paper presents algorithms for shaping such swarms in 2D using boundary walls. The range of configurations created by conforming a swarm to a boundary wall is limited. We…
Micro- and nanorobots are often controlled by global input signals, such as an electromagnetic or gravitational field. These fields move each robot maximally until it hits a stationary obstacle or another stationary robot. This paper…
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…
Collective control of mobile microrobotic swarms is indispensable for their potential high-impact applications in targeted drug delivery, medical diagnostics, parallel micromanipulation, and environmental sensing and remediation. Lack of…
Particle swarm optimisation is a metaheuristic algorithm which finds reasonable solutions in a wide range of applied problems if suitable parameters are used. We study the properties of the algorithm in the framework of random dynamical…
When designing swarm-robotic systems, systematic comparison of algorithms from different domains is necessary to determine which is capable of scaling up to handle the target problem size and target operating conditions. We propose a set of…
Micro- and molecular-robotic systems act as large-scale swarms. Capabilities of sensing, communication and information processing are very limited on these scales. This short position paper describes a swarm-based minimalistic approach,…
The biologically-inspired swarm paradigm is being used to design self-organizing systems of locally interacting artificial agents. A major difficulty in designing swarms with desired characteristics is understanding the causal relation…
Self-organized aggregation is a well studied behavior in swarm robotics as it is the pre-condition for the development of more advanced group-level responses. In this paper, we investigate the design of decentralized algorithms for a swarm…
This paper investigates how a novel paradigm called group-control can be effectively used for motion planning for microrobot swarms in a global field. We prove that Small-Time Local Controllability (STLC) in robot positions is achievable…
Small-size robots offer access to spaces that are inaccessible to larger ones. This type of access is crucial in applications such as drug delivery, environmental detection, and collection of small samples. However, there are some tasks…
Robot swarms can be tasked with a variety of automated sensing and inspection applications in aerial, aquatic, and surface environments. In this paper, we study a simplified two-outcome surface inspection task. We task a group of robots to…
Any strategy used to distribute a robot ensemble over a set of sequential tasks is subject to inaccuracy due to robot-level uncertainties and environmental influences on the robots' behavior. We approach the problem of inaccuracy during…
There is a belief that complexity and chaos are essential for adaptability. But life deals with complexity every moment, without the chaos that engineers fear so, by invoking goal-directed behaviour. Goals can be programmed. That is why…
In a robotic swarm, parameters such as position and proximity to the target can be described in terms of probability amplitudes. This idea led to recent studies on a quantum approach to the definition of the swarm, including a block-matrix…
Human-swarm interaction is facilitated by a low-dimensional encoding of the swarm formation, independent of the (possibly large) number of robots. We propose using image moments to encode two-dimensional formations of robots. Each robot…
A particle-swarm is a set of indivisible processing elements that traverse a network in order to perform a distributed function. This paper will describe a particular implementation of a particle-swarm that can simulate the behavior of the…