Related papers: Steering a Particle Swarm Using Global Inputs and …
Modern cities are growing ecosystems that face new challenges due to the increasing population demands. One of the many problems they face nowadays is waste management, which has become a pressing issue requiring new solutions. Swarm…
In complex plasmas, the behavior of freely floating micrometer sized particles is studied. The particles can be directly visualized and recorded by digital video cameras. To analyze the dynamics of single particles, reliable algorithms are…
Controlling large-scale particle or robot systems is challenging because of their high dimensionality. We use a centralized stochastic approach that allows for optimal control at the cost of a central element instead of a decentralized…
In this paper, we investigate how to learn to control a group of cooperative agents with limited sensing capabilities such as robot swarms. The agents have only very basic sensor capabilities, yet in a group they can accomplish…
We investigate pneumatic non-prehensile manipulation (i.e., blowing) as a means of efficiently moving scattered objects into a target receptacle. Due to the chaotic nature of aerodynamic forces, a blowing controller must (i) continually…
Swarm intelligence is the collective behavior emerging in systems with locally interacting components. Because of their self-organization capabilities, swarm-based systems show essential properties for handling real-world problems such as…
The analysis and control of large-population systems is of great interest to diverse areas of research and engineering, ranging from epidemiology over robotic swarms to economics and finance. An increasingly popular and effective approach…
In this paper we consider a stochastic deployment problem, where a robotic swarm is tasked with the objective of positioning at least one robot at each of a set of pre-assigned targets while meeting a temporal deadline. Travel times and…
Cyborg insects refer to hybrid robots that integrate living insects with miniature electronic controllers to enable robotic-like programmable control. These creatures exhibit advantages over conventional robots in adaption to complex…
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…
Swarm behaviour engineering is an area of research that seeks to investigate methods and techniques for coordinating computation and action within groups of simple agents to achieve complex global goals like pattern formation, collective…
We study the variant of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) that applies random velocities in a dimension instead of the regular velocity update equations as soon as the so-called potential of the swarm falls below a certain bound in this…
Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…
This paper addresses the issues of controlling and analyzing the population diversity in quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO), which is an optimization approach motivated by concepts in quantum mechanics and PSO. In order to…
Steering large-scale swarms with only limited control updates is often needed due to communication or computational constraints, yet most learning-based approaches do not account for this and instead model instantaneous velocity fields. As…
Swarms of large numbers of agents appear in many biological and engineering fields. Dynamic bi-stability of co-existing spatio-temporal patterns has been observed in many models of large population swarms. However, many reduced models for…
A key challenge in intelligent robotics is creating robots that are capable of directly interacting with the world around them to achieve their goals. The last decade has seen substantial growth in research on the problem of robot…
Robotic materials are multi-robot systems formulated to leverage the low-order computation and actuation of the constituents to manipulate the high-order behavior of the entire material. We study the behaviors of ensembles composed of smart…
Prior works in human-swarm interaction (HSI) have sought to guide swarm behavior towards established objectives, but may be unable to handle specific scenarios that require finer human supervision, variable autonomy, or application to…
The controllability of passive microparticles that are advected with the fluid flow generated by an actively controlled one is studied. The particles are assumed to be suspended in a viscous fluid and well separated so that the far-field…