Related papers: Programmable collective behavior in dynamically se…
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…
Robot swarms offer significant potential for inspecting diverse infrastructure, ranging from bridges to space stations. However, effective inspection requires accurate robot localization, which demands substantial computational resources…
Small-scale robots offer significant potential in minimally-invasive medical procedures. Due to the nature of soft biological tissues, however, robots are exposed to complex environments with various challenges in locomotion, which is…
The collective performance or capacity of collaborative autonomous systems such as a swarm of robots is jointly influenced by the morphology and the behavior of individual systems in that collective. In that context, this paper explores how…
We present the first decentralized multi-copter flock that performs stable autonomous outdoor flight with up to 10 flying agents. By decentralized and autonomous we mean that all members navigate themselves based on the dynamic information…
Magnetic rolling microrobots enable gentle manipulation in confined microfluidic environments, yet autonomy for contact-rich behaviors such as cell pushing and multi-target assembly remains difficult to develop and evaluate reproducibly. We…
The control of collective robotic systems, such as drone swarms, is often delegated to autonomous navigation algorithms due to their high dimensionality. However, like other robotic entities, drone swarms can still benefit from being…
This paper presents a low-cost, centralized modular underwater robot platform, ModCube, which can be used to study swarm coordination for a wide range of tasks in underwater environments. A ModCube structure consists of multiple ModCube…
For robots to be a part of our daily life, they need to be able to navigate among crowds not only safely but also in a socially compliant fashion. This is a challenging problem because humans tend to navigate by implicitly cooperating with…
Many organisms leverage an interplay between shape and activity to generate motion and adapt to their environment. Embedding such feedback into synthetic microrobots could eliminate the need for sensors, software, and actuators, yet current…
We present a geometric design rule for size-controlled clustering of self-propelled particles. We show that active particles that tend to rotate under an external force have an intrinsic, signed parameter with units of curvature which we…
We argue that embryological morphogenesis provides a model of how massive swarms of microscopic agents can be coordinated to assemble complex, multiscale hierarchical structures. This is accomplished by understanding natural morphogenetic…
Collective behaviors such as swarming and flocking emerge from simple, decentralized interactions in biological systems. Existing models, such as Vicsek and Cucker-Smale, lack collision avoidance, whereas the Olfati-Saber model imposes…
Formation flight has a vast potential for aerial robot swarms in various applications. However, existing methods lack the capability to achieve fully autonomous large-scale formation flight in dense environments. To bridge the gap, we…
Collective behaviour is a widespread phenomenon in biology, cutting through a huge span of scales, from cell colonies up to bird flocks and fish schools. The most prominent trait of collective behaviour is the emergence of global order:…
Collective motion is one of the most fascinating phenomena observed in the nature. In the last decade, it aroused so much attention in physics, control and robotics fields. In particular, many studies have been done in swarm robotics…
In this article, we investigate symmetry properties of distributed systems of mobile robots. We consider a swarm of $n\in\mathbb{N}$ robots in the $\mathcal{OBLOT}$ model and analyze their collective $\mathcal{F}$sync dynamics using of…
It is known from both theory and experiments that introducing time delays into the communication network of mobile-agent swarms produces coherent rotational patterns. Often such spatio-temporal rotations can be bistable with other swarming…
Mobile robots are traditionally developed to be reactive and avoid collisions with surrounding humans, often moving in unnatural ways without following social protocols, forcing people to behave very differently from human-human interaction…
A fundamental challenge in multi-robot motion planning is achieving sufficient coordination to avoid inter-robot conflicts without incurring the large computational expense of searching the joint configuration space of the robot group. In…