Related papers: Engineered Self-Organization for Resilient Robot S…
We consider self-organization and memory formation in a mesoscopic model of an amorphous solid subject to a random shear strain protocol confined to a strain range $\pm \varepsilon_{\rm max}$. We develop proper read-out protocols to show…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…
We consider the problem of completely covering an unknown discrete environment with a swarm of asynchronous, frequently-crashing autonomous mobile robots. We represent the environment by a discrete graph, and task the robots with occupying…
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)…
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
We present a biologically inspired design for swarm foraging based on ant's pheromone deployment, where the swarm is assumed to have very restricted capabilities. The robots do not require global or relative position measurements and the…
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…
Mobile robots rely on maps to navigate through an environment. In the absence of any map, the robots must build the map online from partial observations as they move in the environment. Traditional methods build a map using only direct…
In this letter, we present a constraint-driven optimal control framework that achieves emergent cluster flocking within a constrained 2D environment. We formulate a decentralized optimal control problem that includes safety, flocking, and…
This study presents a system integration approach for planning schedules, sequences, tasks, and motions for reconfigurable robots to automatically disassemble constrained structures in a non-destructive manner. Such systems must adapt their…
When studying robots collaborating with humans, much of the focus has been on robot policies that coordinate fluently with human teammates in collaborative tasks. However, less emphasis has been placed on the effect of the environment on…
Individual differences in learning behavior within social groups, whether in humans, other animals, or among robots, can have significant effects on collective task performance. This is because it can affect individuals' response to the…
Social organisms which construct nests consisting of tunnels and chambers necessarily navigate confined and crowded conditions. Unlike low-density collectives like bird flocks and insect swarms, in which hydrodynamic and statistical…
Modular and reconfigurable robotic systems have been designed to provide a customized solution for the non-repetitive tasks to be performed in a constrained environment. Customized solutions are normally extracted from task-based…
Understanding how species persist under interacting stressors is a central challenge in ecology. We develop a spatially explicit reaction-diffusion framework to investigate competing species in landscapes shaped by climate variability,…
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…
The self-organizing behavior of swarms of inter- acting particles or agents is a topic of intense research in fields extending from biology to physics and robotics. In this paper, we carry out a systematic study of how the stable…
Voluntary behavior of humans appears to be composed of small, elementary building blocks or behavioral primitives. While this modular organization seems crucial for the learning of complex motor skills and the flexible adaption of behavior…
In swarm robotics, just as for an animal swarm in Nature, one of the aims is to reach and maintain a desired configuration. One of the possibilities for the team, to reach this aim, is to see what its neighbours are doing. This approach…
In this paper, we present a heterogeneous robot swarm system that can physically couple with each other to form functional structures and dynamically decouple to perform individual tasks. The connection between robots can be formed with a…