Related papers: Characterizing Universal Reconfigurability of Modu…
We study an elementary problem of the topological robotics: collective motion of a set of $n$ distinct particles which one has to move from an initial configuration to a final configuration, with the requirement that no collisions occur in…
Cells and microorganisms employ dynamic shape changes to enable steering and avoidance for efficient spatial exploration and collective organization. In contrast, active colloids, their synthetic counterparts, currently lack similar…
Pulse-coupled systems such as spiking neural networks exhibit nontrivial invariant sets in the form of attracting yet unstable saddle periodic orbits where units are synchronized into groups. Heteroclinic connections between such orbits may…
Recently, several approaches have attempted to combine motion generation and control in one loop to equip robots with reactive behaviors, that cannot be achieved with traditional time-indexed tracking controllers. These approaches however…
This paper presents the design and performance of a screw-propelled redundant serpentine robot. This robot comprises serially linked, identical modules, each incorporating an Archimedes' screw for propulsion and a universal joint (U-Joint)…
A swarm of anonymous oblivious mobile robots, operating in deterministic Look-Compute-Move cycles, is confined within a circular track. All robots agree on the clockwise direction (chirality), they are activated by an adversarial…
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…
Robots with very limited capabilities are placed on the vertices of a graph and are required to move toward a single, common vertex, where they remain stationary once they arrive. This task is referred to as the GATHERING problem. Most of…
We prove that Balanced Biclique Reconfiguration on bipartite graphs is PSPACE-complete. This implies the PSPACE-completeness of the spanning variant of Subgraph Reconfiguration under the token jumping rule for the property "a graph is an…
The reconfiguration problem for homomorphisms of digraphs to a reflexive digraph cycle, which amounts to deciding if a `reconfiguration graph' is connected, is known to by polynomially time solvable via a greedy algorithm based on certain…
This paper discusses the design of a novel compliant in-pipe climbing modular robot for small diameter pipes. The robot consists of a kinematic chain of 3 OmniCrawler modules with a link connected in between 2 adjacent modules via compliant…
In this paper we study a multi-robot path planning problem for persistent monitoring of an environment. We represent the areas to be monitored as the vertices of a weighted graph. For each vertex, there is a constraint on the maximum time…
Homoclinic snaking refers to the sinusoidal snaking continuation curve of homoclinic orbits near a heteroclinic cycle connecting an equilibrium E and a periodic orbit P. Along this curve the homoclinic orbit performs more and more windings…
Multi-party multi-objective optimization problems (MPMOPs) require consensus among autonomous decision makers and therefore differ from flattened many-objective formulations. Existing runtime theory for multi-objective evolutionary…
In the arbitrary pattern formation problem, $n$ autonomous, mobile robots must form an arbitrary pattern $P \subseteq \mathbb{R}^2$. The (deterministic) robots are typically assumed to be indistinguishable, disoriented, and unable to…
We present a general and modular algorithmic framework for path planning of robots. Our framework combines geometric methods for exact and complete analysis of low-dimensional configuration spaces, together with practical, considerably…
This paper studies the problem of controlling a multi-robot system to achieve a polygon formation in a self-organized manner. Different from the typical formation control strategies where robots are steered to satisfy the predefined control…
Learning a universal policy across different robot morphologies can significantly improve learning efficiency and generalization in continuous control. However, it poses a challenging multi-task reinforcement learning problem, as the…
We generalize the well-studied problem of gait learning in modular robots in two dimensions. Firstly, we address locomotion in a given target direction that goes beyond learning a typical undirected gait. Secondly, rather than studying one…
Humanoid robots require diverse motor skills to integrate into complex environments, but bridging the kinematic and dynamic embodiment gap from human data remains a major bottleneck. We demonstrate through Hessian analysis that traditional…