Related papers: Swarm Control of Magnetically Actuated Millirobots

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…

This paper studies the problem of having mobile robots in a multi-robot system maintain an estimate of the relative position and relative orientation of near-by robots in the environment. This problem is studied in the context of large…

The control of swarm systems is relatively well understood for simple robotic platforms at the macro scale. However, there are still several unanswered questions about how similar results can be achieved for microrobots. In this paper, we…

Micro- and nanorobots are often controlled by global input signals, such as an electromagnetic or gravitational field. These fields move each robot maximally until it hits a stationary obstacle or another stationary robot. This paper…

This paper investigates efficient techniques to collect and concentrate an under-actuated particle swarm despite obstacles. Concentrating a swarm of particles is of critical importance in health-care for targeted drug delivery, where…

We present a decentralized algorithm to achieve segregation into an arbitrary number of groups with swarms of autonomous robots. The distinguishing feature of our approach is in the minimalistic assumptions on which it is based.…

In this research report details of design of a miniature wheel arrangement are presented. This miniature wheel arrangement is essentially a direction control mechanism intended for use on a mobile robot platform or base. The design is a…

Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…

Morphological computing, the use of the physical design of a robot to ease the realization of a given task has been proven to be a relevant concept in the context of swarm robotics. Here we demonstrate both experimentally and numerically,…

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…

Untethered magnetic manipulation of biomedical millirobots has a high potential for minimally invasive surgical applications. However, it is still challenging to exert high actuation forces on the small robots over a large distance.…

Swarm robots, inspired by the emergence of animal herds, are robots that assemble a large number of modules and self-organize themselves to form specific morphologies and exhibit specific functions. These modular robots perform relatively…

Effective exploration abilities are fundamental for robot swarms, especially when small, inexpensive robots are employed (e.g., micro- or nano-robots). Random walks are often the only viable choice if robots are too constrained regarding…

Magnetic microrobots can be navigated by an external magnetic field to autonomously move within living organisms with complex and unstructured environments. Potential applications include drug delivery, diagnostics, and therapeutic…

Serially connected robots are promising candidates for performing tasks in confined spaces such as search-and-rescue in large-scale disasters. Such robots are typically limbless, and we hypothesize that the addition of limbs could improve…

This paper presents an approach to externally influencing a team of robots by means of time-varying density functions. These density functions represent rough references for where the robots should be located. To this end, a continuous-time…

Robot swarms have been shown to improve the ability of individual robots by inter-robot collaboration. In this paper, we present the PuzzleBots - a low-cost robotic swarm system where robots can physically couple with each other to form…

Untethered magnetic millirobots offer significant potential for minimally invasive cardiac therapies; however, achieving reliable autonomous control in pulsatile cardiac flow remains challenging. This work presents a vision-guided control…

In this paper, we introduce a semi-decentralized control technique for a swarm of robots transporting a fragile object to a destination in an uncertain occluded environment.The proposed approach has been split into two parts. The initial…

Complexity, cost, and power requirements for the actuation of individual robots can play a large factor in limiting the size of robotic swarms. Here we present PCBot, a minimalist robot that can precisely move on an orbital shake table…