Related papers: Fault-Induced Dynamics of Oblivious Robots on a Li…
Robotic manipulation research has investigated contact-rich problems and strategies that require robots to intentionally collide with their environment, to accomplish tasks that cannot be handled by traditional collision-free solutions. By…
Robotic cloth manipulation faces challenges due to the fabric's complex dynamics and the high dimensionality of configuration spaces. Previous methods have largely focused on isolated smoothing or folding tasks and overly reliant on…
Symmetry is one of the most central concepts in physics, and it is no surprise that it has also been widely adopted as an inductive bias for machine-learning models applied to the physical sciences. This is especially true for models…
The exploration problem in the discrete universe, using identical oblivious asynchronous robots without direct communication, has been well investigated. These robots have sensors that allow them to see their environment and move…
Convex optimization is crucial in controlling legged robots, where stability and optimal control are vital. Many control problems can be formulated as convex optimization problems, with a convex cost function and constraints capturing…
We study the \textit{min-sum uniform coverage} problem for a swarm of $n$ mobile robots on a given finite line segment and on a circle having finite positive radius, where the circle is given as an input. The robots must coordinate their…
The OBLOT model has been extensively studied in theoretical swarm robotics. It assumes weak capabilities for the involved mobile robots, such as they are anonymous, disoriented, no memory of past events (oblivious), and silent. Their only…
We investigate autonomous mobile robots in the Euclidean plane. A robot has a function called target function to decide the destination from the robots' positions. Robots may have different target functions. If the robots whose target…
As robots become ubiquitous in the workforce, it is essential that human-robot collaboration be both intuitive and adaptive. A robot's quality improves based on its ability to explicitly reason about the time-varying (i.e. learning curves)…
Fault tolerance is increasingly important for unmanned autonomous vehicles. For example, in a multi robot system the agents need the ability to effectively detect and tolerate internal failures in order to continue performing their tasks…
A set of mobile robots is placed at points of an infinite line. The robots are equipped with GPS devices and they may communicate their positions on the line to a central authority. The collection contains an unknown subset of "spies",…
Dynamic task allocation is an essential requirement for multi-robot systems operating in unknown dynamic environments. It allows robots to change their behavior in response to environmental changes or actions of other robots in order to…
Reasoning about potential occlusions is essential for robots to efficiently predict whether an object exists in an environment. Though existing work shows that a robot with active perception can achieve various tasks, it is still unclear if…
Failures in robotics can have disastrous consequences that worsen rapidly over time. This, the ability to rely on robotic systems, depends on our ability to monitor them and intercede when necessary, manually or autonomously. Prior work in…
Navigation and guidance of autonomous vehicles is a fundamental problem in robotics, which has attracted intensive research in recent decades. This report is mainly concerned with provable collision avoidance of multiple autonomous vehicles…
Control of underactuated dynamical systems has been studied for decades in robotics, and is now emerging in other fields such as neuroscience. Most of the advances have been in model based control theory, which has limitations when the…
We consider geometric collision-detection problems for modular reconfigurable robots. Assuming the nodes (modules) are connected squares on a grid, we investigate the complexity of deciding whether collisions may occur, or can be avoided,…
Co-designing a robot's morphology and control can ensure synergistic interactions between them, prevalent in biological organisms. However, co-design is a high-dimensional search problem. To make this search tractable, we need a systematic…
Among fundamental problems in the context of distributed computing by autonomous mobile entities, one of the most representative and well studied is {\sc Point Convergence}: given an arbitrary initial configuration of identical entities,…
Synthetic active collectives, composed of many nonliving individuals capable of cooperative changes in group shape and dynamics, hold promise for practical applications and for the elucidation of guiding principles of natural collectives.…