Related papers: Collective transport via sequential caging

In this work, we present a novel distributed method for constructing an occupancy grid map of an unknown environment using a swarm of robots with global localization capabilities and limited inter-robot communication. The robots explore the…

In robotics, data acquisition often plays a key part in unknown environment exploration. For example, storing information about the topography of the explored terrain or the natural dangers in the environment can inform the decision-making…

Swarm guidance addresses a challenging problem considering the navigation and control of a group of passive agents. To solve this problem, shepherding offers a bio-inspired technique of navigating such group of agents by using external…

We present a system to coordinate 'urban mobility swarms' in order to promote the use and safety of lightweight, sustainable transit, while enhancing the vibrancy and community fabric of cities. This work draws from behavior exhibited by…

We consider a team of mobile autonomous robots with the aim to cover a given set of targets. Each robot aims to select a target to cover and physically reach it by the final time in coordination with other robots given the locations of…

In robot swarms operating under highly restrictive sensing and communication constraints, individuals may need to use direct physical proximity to facilitate information exchange. However, in certain task-related scenarios, this requirement…

We study the problem that requires a team of robots to perform joint localization and target tracking task while ensuring team connectivity and collision avoidance. The problem can be formalized as a nonlinear, non-convex optimization…

Task allocation using a team or coalition of robots is one of the most important problems in robotics, computer science, operational research, and artificial intelligence. In recent work, research has focused on handling complex objectives…

Robotic shepherding is a bio-inspired approach to autonomously guiding a swarm of agents towards a desired location. The research area has earned increasing research interest recently due to the efficacy of controlling a large number of…

Cooperative transportation, a key aspect of logistics cyber-physical systems (CPS), is typically approached using dis tributed control and optimization-based methods. The distributed control methods consume less time, but poorly handle and…

For robots to be a part of our daily life, they need to be able to navigate among crowds not only safely but also in a socially compliant fashion. This is a challenging problem because humans tend to navigate by implicitly cooperating with…

We consider the problem of sorting a densely cluttered pile of unknown objects using a robot. This yet unsolved problem is relevant in the robotic waste sorting business. By extending previous active learning approaches to grasping, we show…

Mobile microrobots are envisioned to be useful in a wide range of high-impact applications, many of which requiring cohesive group formation to maintain self-bounded swarms in the absence of confining boundaries. Cohesive group formation…

Mutual localization provides a consensus of reference frame as an essential basis for cooperation in multirobot systems. Previous works have developed certifiable and robust solvers for relative transformation estimation between each pair…

Swarm robotics has experienced a rapid expansion in recent years, primarily fueled by specialized multi-robot systems developed to achieve dedicated collective actions. These specialized platforms are in general designed with swarming…

Controlling a team of robots in a coordinated manner is challenging because centralized approaches (where all computation is performed on a central machine) scale poorly, and globally referenced external localization systems may not always…

This paper considers cooperative control of robots involving two different testbed systems in remote locations with communication on the internet. This provides us the capability to exchange robots status like positions, velocities and…

Two cooperating, autonomous mobile robots with arbitrary nonzero max speeds are placed at arbitrary initial positions in the plane. A remotely detonated bomb is discovered at some source location and must be moved to a safe distance away…

Payload transport over flat terrain via multi-wheel robot carriers is well-understood, highly effective, and configurable. In this paper, our goal is to provide similar effectiveness and configurability for transport over rough terrain that…

In this work we consider three different cases of robot-robot interactions and resulting global information transfer in robot swarms. These mechanisms define cooperative properties of the system and can be used for designing collective…