Related papers: Hardness of Reconfiguring Robot Swarms with Unifor…
This study investigates the use of global control strategies to enhance the directed migration of swarms of interacting self-propelled particles confined in a channel. Uncontrolled dynamics naturally leads to wall accumulation, clogging,…
When particles move at a constant speed and have the tendency to align their directions of motion, ordered large scale movement can emerge despite significant levels of noise. Many variants of this model of self-propelled particles have…
The emergence of collective motion, also known as flocking or swarming, in groups of moving individuals who orient themselves using only information from their neighbors is a very general phenomenon that is manifested at multiple spatial…
In the coordinated motion planning problem, we are given a graph together with the starting and destination vertices of $k$ robots. At each time step, any subset of robots may move, each traversing an edge of the graph, provided that no two…
In this paper, we consider the partial gathering problem of mobile agents in asynchronous unidirectional rings equipped with whiteboards on nodes. The partial gathering problem is a new generalization of the total gathering problem. The…
Consider a set of $n$ simple autonomous mobile robots (asynchronous, no common coordinate system, no identities, no central coordination, no direct communication, no memory of the past, non-rigid, deterministic) initially in distinct…
We present a number of breakthroughs for coordinated motion planning, in which the objective is to reconfigure a swarm of labeled convex objects by a combination of parallel, continuous, collision-free translations into a given target…
There is a belief that complexity and chaos are essential for adaptability. But life deals with complexity every moment, without the chaos that engineers fear so, by invoking goal-directed behaviour. Goals can be programmed. That is why…
Robust localization in a given map is a crucial component of most autonomous robots. In this paper, we address the problem of localizing in an indoor environment that changes and where prominent structures have no correspondence in the map…
A great number of robotics applications demand the rearrangement of many mobile objects, e.g., organizing products on shelves, shuffling containers at shipping ports, reconfiguring fleets of mobile robots, and so on. To boost the throughput…
We study a generalized motion planning problem involving multiple autonomous robots navigating in a $d$-dimensional Euclidean space in the presence of a set of obstacles whose positions are unknown a priori. Each robot is required to visit…
We investigate the reconfiguration of $n$ blocks, or "tokens", in the square grid using "line pushes". A line push is performed from one of the four cardinal directions and pushes all tokens that are maximum in that direction to the…
Microrobotics has 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 unique…
In the problem of multi-robot motion planning, a group of robots, placed in a polygonal domain with obstacles, must be moved from their starting positions to a set of target positions. We consider the specific case of unlabeled disc robots…
Physically disentangling entangled objects from each other is a problem encountered in waste segregation or in any task that requires disassembly of structures. Often there are no object models, and, especially with cluttered irregularly…
We consider the following variant of the two dimensional gathering problem for swarms of robots: Given a swarm of $n$ indistinguishable, point shaped robots on a two dimensional grid. Initially, the robots form a closed chain on the grid…
We consider optimal swarm control problems where two different classes of agents are present. Continuum idealizations of large-scale swarms are used where the dynamics describe the evolution of the spatially-distributed densities of each…
Shape formation is a basic distributed problem for systems of computational mobile entities. Intensively studied for systems of autonomous mobile robots, it has recently been investigated in the realm of programmable matter. Namely, it has…
Imagine coating buildings and bridges with smart particles (also coined smart paint) that monitor structural integrity and sense and report on traffic and wind loads, leading to technology that could do such inspection jobs faster and…
We present a unified approach for constraint displacement problems in which a robot finds a feasible path by displacing constraints or obstacles. To this end, we propose a two stage process that returns locally optimal obstacle…