Related papers: Hardness of Reconfiguring Robot Swarms with Unifor…
We investigate the collective motion of self-propelled agents in an environment filled with obstacles that are tethered to fixed positions via springs. The active particles are able to modify the environment by moving the obstacles through…
We study two well-known reconfiguration problems. Given a start and a target configuration of geometric objects in a polygon, we wonder whether we can move the objects from the start configuration to the target configuration while avoiding…
A configuration of $n$ unit-cube-shaped \textit{modules} (or \textit{robots}) is a lattice-aligned placement of the $n$ modules so that their union is face-connected. The reconfiguration problem aims at finding a sequence of moves that…
Assembly of large scale structural systems in space is understood as critical to serving applications that cannot be deployed from a single launch. Recent literature proposes the use of discrete modular structures for in-space assembly and…
Motivated by the prospect of nano-robots that assist human physiological functions at the nanoscale, we investigate the coating problem in the three-dimensional model for hybrid programmable matter. In this model, a single agent with…
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…
In many contexts the modal properties of a structure change, either due to the impact of a changing environment, fatigue, or due to the presence of structural damage. For example during flight, an aircraft's modal properties are known to…
We study the problem of planning paths for $p$ distinguishable pebbles (robots) residing on the vertices of an $n$-vertex connected graph with $p \le n$. A pebble may move from a vertex to an adjacent one in a time step provided that it…
Cooperative transport is a striking phenomenon where multiple agents join forces to transit a payload too heavy for the individual. While social animals such as ants are routinely observed to coordinate transport at scale, reproducing the…
Reorientation (turning in plane) plays a critical role for all robots in any field application, especially those that in confined spaces. While important, reorientation remains a relatively unstudied problem for robots, including limbless…
We consider the problem of steering a collection of n particles that obey identical n-dimensional linear dynamics via a common state feedback law towards a rearrangement of their positions, cast as a controllability problem for a dynamical…
We consider algorithmic problems motivated by modular robotic reconfiguration in the sliding square model, in which we are given $n$ square-shaped modules in a (labeled or unlabeled) start configuration and need to find a schedule of…
A robotic platform for mobile manipulation needs to satisfy two contradicting requirements for many real-world applications: A compact base is required to navigate through cluttered indoor environments, while the support needs to be large…
We study transport of interacting particles in weakly disordered media. Our one-dimensional system includes (i) disorder: the hopping rate governing the movement of a particle between two neighboring lattice sites is inhomogeneous, and (ii)…
Active matter physics and swarm robotics have provided powerful tools for the study and control of ensembles driven by internal sources. At the macroscale, controlling swarms typically utilizes significant memory, processing power, and…
We study the Universal Solvability of Robot Motion Planning on Graphs (USolR) problem: given an undirected graph $G = (V, E)$ and $p$ robots, determine whether any arbitrary configuration of the robots can be transformed into any other…
We propose novel particle swarm optimization (PSO) variants incorporated with deep neural networks (DNNs) for particles to pursue globally optimal positions in dynamic environments. PSO is a heuristic approach for solving complex…
Swarm robotics utilises decentralised self-organising systems to form complex collective behaviours built from the bottom-up using individuals that have limited capabilities. Previous work has shown that simple occlusion-based strategies…
Navigating fluently around pedestrians is a necessary capability for mobile robots deployed in human environments, such as buildings and homes. While research on social navigation has focused mainly on the scalability with the number of…
We investigate Anderson transitions for a system of two particles moving in a three-dimensional disordered lattice and subject to on-site (Hubbard) interactions of strength U. The two-body problem is exactly mapped into an effective…