Related papers: Spacecraft Swarm Attitude Control for Small Body S…

Astrobot swarms are used to capture astronomical signals to generate the map of the observable universe for the purpose of dark energy studies. The convergence of each swarm in the course of its coordination has to surpass a particular…

This paper tackles the problem of positioning a swarm of UAVs inside a completely unknown terrain, having as objective to maximize the overall situational awareness. The situational awareness is expressed by the number and quality of unique…

The science and origins of asteroids is deemed high priority in the Planetary Science Decadal Survey. Two of the main questions from the Decadal Survey pertain to what the "initial stages, conditions, and processes of solar system formation…

Whereas naturally occurring swarms thrive when crowded, physical interactions in robotic swarms are either avoided or carefully controlled, thus limiting their operational density. Here we present a mechanical design rule that allows robots…

Autonomous navigation of UAV swarms in perceptually-degraded environments, where GPS is unavailable and terrain is densely cluttered, presents a critical bottleneck for real-world deployment. Existing optimization-based planners lack the…

Swarm of drones are increasingly being asked to carry out missions that can't be completed by one drone. Particularly, in delivery, issues arise due to the swarm's limited flight endurance. Hence, we propose a novel formation-guided…

We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and…

Swarm robotic systems are systems in which multiple robots having simple functionality perform tasks through their cooperation, and are advantageous in that they can exhibit non-trivial macroscopic functions such as adaptability, fault…

Swarm robotic systems utilize collective behaviour to achieve goals that might be too complex for a lone entity, but become attainable with localized communication and collective decision making. In this paper, a behaviour-based distributed…

Collaborative simultaneous localization and mapping (CSLAM) is essential for autonomous aerial swarms, laying the foundation for downstream algorithms such as planning and control. To address existing CSLAM systems' limitations in relative…

This paper investigates a swarm-based concept in which a number of nanosatellites, referred to as NanoTugs, are deployed by a mother spacecraft to capture and cooperatively stabilize and de-orbit space debris. The study focuses on the…

Onboard autonomy technologies such as planning and scheduling, identification of scientific targets, and content-based data summarization, will lead to exciting new space science missions. However, the challenge of operating missions with…

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…

Collective animal behaviors are paradigmatic examples of fully decentralized operations involving complex collective computations such as collective turns in flocks of birds or collective harvesting by ants. These systems offer a unique…

To extend the limited scope of autonomy used in prior missions for operation in distant and complex environments, there is a need to further develop and mature autonomy that jointly reasons over multiple subsystems, which we term…

When individual robots have limited sensing capabilities or insufficient fault tolerance, it becomes necessary for multiple robots to form teams during exploration, thereby increasing the collective observation range and reliability.…

This paper proposes a novel swarm-based control algorithm for exploration and coverage of unknown environments, while maintaining a formation that permits short-range communication. The algorithm combines two elements: swarm rules for…

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,…

In this paper, we propose a cost-effective strategy for heterogeneous UAV swarm systems for cooperative aerial inspection. Unlike previous swarm inspection works, the proposed method does not rely on precise prior knowledge of the…

Motion planning is an essential part of autonomous mobile platforms. A good pipeline should be modular enough to handle different vehicles, environments, and perception modules. The planning process has to cope with all the different…