Related papers: Swarm robotics and complex behaviour of continuum …
This paper investigates the role of communication in improving coordination within robot swarms, focusing on a paradigm where learning and execution occur simultaneously in a decentralized manner. We highlight the role communication can…
Bearing measurements,as the most common modality in nature, have recently gained traction in multi-robot systems to enhance mutual localization and swarm collaboration. Despite their advantages, challenges such as sensory noise, obstacle…
Discrete simulation methods are efficient tools to investigate the complex behaviors of complex fluids made of either dry granular materials or dilute suspensions. By contrast, materials made of soft and/or concentrated units (emulsions,…
The safe control of multi-robot swarms is a challenging and active field of research, where common goals include maintaining group cohesion while simultaneously avoiding obstacles and inter-agent collision. Building off our previously…
Structure and ordering in swarms of active particles have much in common with condensed matter systems like magnets or liquid crystals. A number of important characteristics of such materials can be obtained via dynamic tests such as…
We investigate the effect of turning delays on the behaviour of groups of differential wheeled robots and show that the group-level behaviour can be described by a transport equation with a suitably incorporated delay. The results of our…
Collective animal behaviors are paradigmatic examples of fully decentralized operations involving complex collective computations such as collective turns in flocks of birds or collective harvesting by ants. These systems offer a unique…
Natural systems often exhibit chaotic behavior in their space-time evolution. Systems transiting between chaos and order manifest a potential to compute, as shown with cellular automata and artificial neural networks. We demonstrate that…
Modelling biological or engineering swarms is challenging due to the inherently high dimension of the system, despite the often low-dimensional emergent dynamics. Most existing swarm modelling approaches are based on first principles and…
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…
One of the most important promises of decentralized systems is scalability, which is often assumed to be present in robot swarm systems without being contested. Simple limitations, such as movement congestion and communication conflicts,…
Particle robots are novel biologically-inspired robotic systems where locomotion can be achieved collectively and robustly, but not independently. While its control is currently limited to a hand-crafted policy for basic locomotion tasks,…
The giant single-celled slime mould Physarum polycephalum exhibits complex morphological adaptation and amoeboid movement as it forages for food and may be seen as a minimal example of complex robotic behaviour. Swarm computation has…
For robotic vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in pedestrian-rich environments, it is important to model subtle human behaviors and navigation rules (e.g., passing on the right). However, while instinctive to humans, socially…
Swarms of coupled mobile agents subject to inter-agent wireless communication delays are known to exhibit multiple dynamic patterns in space that depend on the strength of the interactions and the magnitude of the communication delays. We…
Soft continuum robots achieve complex deformation through elastic equilibrium, making their reachable motions governed jointly by structural design and actuation-induced mechanics. This work develops a general formulation that integrates…
We explore a simplified class of models we call swarms, which are inspired by the collective behavior of social insects. We perform a mean-field stability analysis and perform numerical simulations of the model. Several interesting types of…
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…
Signal source seeking using autonomous vehicles is a complex problem. The complexity increases manifold when signal intensities captured by physical sensors onboard are noisy and unreliable. Added to the fact that signal strength decays…
Anatomical models of a medical robot's environment can significantly help guide design and development of a new robotic system. These models can be used for benchmarking motion planning algorithms, evaluating controllers, optimizing…