Related papers: ShapeBots: Shape-changing Swarm Robots
We present a distributed algorithm for a swarm of active particles to camouflage in an environment. Each particle is equipped with sensing, computation and communication, allowing the system to take color and gradient information from the…
Cyborg insects refer to hybrid robots that integrate living insects with miniature electronic controllers to enable robotic-like programmable control. These creatures exhibit advantages over conventional robots in adaption to complex…
Group processes refer to the dynamics that occur within a group and are critical for understanding how groups function. With robots being increasingly placed within small groups, improving these processes has emerged as an important…
More widespread adoption requires swarms of robots to be more flexible for real-world applications. Multiple challenges remain in complex scenarios where a large amount of data needs to be processed in real-time and high degrees of…
Swarm foraging is a common test case application for multi-robot systems. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for controlling swarm robots with limited communication range and storage capacity to efficiently search for and retrieve…
Nature evolves creatures with a high complexity of morphological and behavioral intelligence, meanwhile computational methods lag in approaching that diversity and efficacy. Co-optimization of artificial creatures' morphology and control in…
Humans grasp unfamiliar objects by combining an initial visual estimate with tactile and proprioceptive feedback during interaction. We present ShapeGrasp, a robotic implementation of this approach. The proposed method is an iterative…
Some animals exhibit multi-modal locomotion capability to traverse a wide range of terrains and environments, such as amphibians that can swim and walk or birds that can fly and walk. This capability is extremely beneficial for expanding…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…
Past experiences under the designation of "Swarm Paintings" conducted in 2001, not only confirmed the possibility of realizing an artificial art (thus non-human), as introduced into the process the questioning of creative migration,…
This paper proposes an intuitive human-swarm interaction framework inspired by our childhood memory in which we interacted with living ants by changing their positions and environments as if we were omnipotent relative to the ants. In…
Reconfigurable robot swarms are capable of connecting with each other to form complex structures. Current mechanical or magnetic connection mechanisms can be complicated to manufacture, consume high power, have a limited load-bearing…
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…
Large-scale shape-changing interfaces have great potential, but creating such systems requires substantial time, cost, space, and efforts, which hinders the research community to explore interactions beyond the scale of human hands. We…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a robust motion formation distributed control algorithm for a team of mobile robots. The primary task for the team is to form a geometric shape, which can be freely translated and…
With the rapid development of robot swarm technology and its diverse applications, navigating robot swarms through complex environments has emerged as a critical research direction. To ensure safe navigation and avoid potential collisions…
The concept of programmable matter envisions a very large number of tiny and simple robot particles forming a smart material. Even though the particles are restricted to local communication, local movement, and simple computation, their…
Soft robots can exhibit diverse behaviors with simple types of actuation by partially outsourcing control to the morphological and material properties of their soft bodies, which is made possible by the tight coupling between control, body,…