Related papers: ShapeBots: Shape-changing Swarm Robots
The pattern formation task is commonly seen in a multi-robot system. In this paper, we study the problem of forming complex shapes with functionally limited mobile robots, which have to rely on other robots to precisely locate themselves.…
Swarm robotic systems are currently being used to address many real-world problems. One interesting application of swarm robotics is the self-organized formation of structures and shapes. Some of the key challenges in the swarm robotic…
We demonstrate how multiagent systems provide useful control techniques for modular self-reconfigurable (metamorphic) robots. Such robots consist of many modules that can move relative to each other, thereby changing the overall shape of…
Biological systems, such as the octopus, exhibit masterful cross-scale manipulation by adaptively reconfiguring their entire form, a capability that remains elusive in robotics. Conventional soft grippers, while compliant, are mostly…
Automatic design is a promising approach to realizing robot swarms. Given a mission to be performed by the swarm, an automatic method produces the required control software for the individual robots. Automatic design has concentrated on…
We present controllers that enable mobile robots to persistently monitor or sweep a changing environment. The changing environment is modeled as a field which grows in locations that are not within range of a robot, and decreases in…
Mean-shift-based approaches have recently emerged as a representative class of methods for robot swarm shape assembly. They rely on image-based target-shape representations to compute local density gradients and perform mean-shift…
Soft Robots distinguish themselves from traditional robots by embracing flexible kinematics. Because of their recent emergence, there exist numerous uncharted territories, including novel actuators, manufacturing processes, and advanced…
Robot swarms have been shown to improve the ability of individual robots by inter-robot collaboration. In this paper, we present the PuzzleBots - a low-cost robotic swarm system where robots can physically couple with each other to form…
Artificial swarm systems have been extensively studied and used in computer science, robotics, engineering and other technological fields, primarily as a platform for implementing robust distributed systems to achieve pre-defined…
In a robotic swarm, parameters such as position and proximity to the target can be described in terms of probability amplitudes. This idea led to recent studies on a quantum approach to the definition of the swarm, including a block-matrix…
Most studies in swarm robotics treat the swarm as an isolated system of interest. We argue that the prevailing view of swarms as self-sufficient, independent systems limits the scope of potential applications for swarm robotics. A robot…
Evolutionary robotics aims to automatically design autonomous adaptive morphological robots that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to environmental changes. Soft robotics have demonstrated the feasibility of…
This study proposes an event-based reconfiguration control to navigate a robot swarm through challenging environments with narrow passages such as valleys, tunnels, and corridors. The robot swarm is modeled as an undirected graph, where…
A leader-follower framework is proposed for multi-robot navigation of large scale teams where the leader agents corral the follower agents. A group of leaders is modeled as a 2D deformable object where discrete masses (i.e., leader robots)…
Abruptions to the communication infrastructure happens occasionally, where manual dedicated personnel will go out to fix the interruptions, restoring communication abilities. However, sometimes this can be dangerous to the personnel…
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…
Isoperimetric robots are large scale, untethered inflatable robots that can undergo large shape changes, but have only been demonstrated in one 3D shape -- an octahedron. These robots consist of independent triangles that can change shape…
This paper explores the expressive capabilities of a swarm of miniature mobile robots within the context of inter-robot interactions and their mapping to the so-called fundamental emotions. In particular, we investigate how motion and shape…
Building a distributed spatial awareness within a swarm of locally sensing and communicating robots enables new swarm algorithms. We use local observations by robots of each other and Gaussian Belief Propagation message passing combined…