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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 present a decoupled algorithm for motion planning for a collection of unit-balls moving among polyhedral obstacles in $\mathbb{R}^d$, for any $d \ge 2$. We assume that the robots have revolving areas in the vicinity of their start and…
In automated manufacturing, robots must reliably assemble parts of various geometries and low tolerances. Ideally, they plan the required motions autonomously. This poses a substantial challenge due to high-dimensional state spaces and…
We consider the gathering problem for asynchronous and oblivious robots that cannot communicate explicitly with each other, but are endowed with visibility sensors that allow them to see the positions of the other robots. Most of the…
Swarm and constellation reconfiguration can be viewed as motion of an unordered point configuration in an ambient space. Here, we provide persistence-stable, symmetry-invariant geometric representations for comparing and monitoring…
Autonomous reconfiguration of agent-based systems is a key challenge in the study of programmable matter, distributed robotics, and molecular self-assembly. While substantial prior work has focused on size-preserving transformations, much…
We investigate the utility of employing multiple buffers in solving a class of rearrangement problems with pick-n-swap manipulation primitives. In this problem, objects stored randomly in a lattice are to be sorted using a robot arm with…
We consider a swarm of mobile robots evolving in a bidimensional Euclidean space. We study a variant of the crash-tolerant gathering problem: if no robot crashes, robots have to meet at the same arbitrary location, not known beforehand, in…
When planning motions in a configuration space that has underlying symmetries (e.g. when manipulating one or multiple symmetric objects), the ideal planning algorithm should take advantage of those symmetries to produce shorter…
We study dense packings of a large number of congruent non-overlapping circles inside a square by looking for configurations which maximize the packing density, defined as the ratio between the area occupied by the disks and the area of the…
We present an algorithm that efficiently computes nearly-optimal solutions to a class of combinatorial reconfiguration problems on weighted, undirected graphs. Inspired by societally relevant applications in networked infrastructure…
In the online bipartite matching problem with replacements, all the vertices on one side of the bipartition are given, and the vertices on the other side arrive one by one with all their incident edges. The goal is to maintain a maximum…
We introduce the use of hierarchical clustering for relaxed, deterministic coordination and control of multiple robots. Traditionally an unsupervised learning method, hierarchical clustering offers a formalism for identifying and…
The choice of a grasp plays a critical role in the success of downstream manipulation tasks. Consider a task of placing an object in a cluttered scene; the majority of possible grasps may not be suitable for the desired placement. In this…
We introduce and analyze a model for self-reconfigurable robots made up of unit-cube modules. Compared to past models, our model aims to newly capture two important practical aspects of real-world robots. First, modules often do not occupy…
Aggregation is a fundamental behavior for swarm robotics that requires a system to gather together in a compact, connected cluster. In 2014, Gauci et al. proposed a surprising algorithm that reliably achieves swarm aggregation using only a…
In this work, we prove that, in linear MDPs, the feature dimension $d$ is lower bounded by $S/U$ in order to aptly represent transition probabilities, where $S$ is the size of the state space and $U$ is the maximum size of directly…
Rearranging objects on a planar surface arises in a variety of robotic applications, such as product packaging. Using two arms can improve efficiency but introduces new computational challenges. This paper studies the structure of dual-arm…
We propose an approach to solve multi-agent path planning (MPP) problems for complex environments. Our method first designs a special pebble graph with a set of feasibility constraints, under which MPP problems have feasibility guarantee.…
Anonymous mobile robots are often classified into synchronous, semi-synchronous and asynchronous robots when discussing the pattern formation problem. For semi-synchronous robots, all patterns formable with memory are also formable without…