Related papers: Morphological computation and decentralized learni…
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 robotic systems utilize collective behaviour to achieve goals that might be too complex for a lone entity, but become attainable with localized communication and collective decision making. In this paper, a behaviour-based distributed…
The human brain's plasticity allows for the integration of artificial body parts into the human body. Leveraging this, embodied systems realize intuitive interactions with the environment. We introduce a novel concept: embodied swarm…
The collective performance or capacity of collaborative autonomous systems such as a swarm of robots is jointly influenced by the morphology and the behavior of individual systems in that collective. In that context, this paper explores how…
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…
We argue that embryological morphogenesis provides a model of how massive swarms of microscopic agents can be coordinated to assemble complex, multiscale hierarchical structures. This is accomplished by understanding natural morphogenetic…
Collective control of mobile microrobotic swarms is indispensable for their potential high-impact applications in targeted drug delivery, medical diagnostics, parallel micromanipulation, and environmental sensing and remediation. Lack of…
Self-organized aggregation is a well studied behavior in swarm robotics as it is the pre-condition for the development of more advanced group-level responses. In this paper, we investigate the design of decentralized algorithms for a swarm…
Swarm robotics is a promising approach for the coordination of large numbers of robots. While previous studies have shown that evolutionary robotics techniques can be applied to obtain robust and efficient self-organized behaviors for robot…
Human-swarm interaction is facilitated by a low-dimensional encoding of the swarm formation, independent of the (possibly large) number of robots. We propose using image moments to encode two-dimensional formations of robots. Each robot…
In this article, we investigate symmetry properties of distributed systems of mobile robots. We consider a swarm of $n\in\mathbb{N}$ robots in the $\mathcal{OBLOT}$ model and analyze their collective $\mathcal{F}$sync dynamics using of…
In recent years, reinforcement learning and its multi-agent analogue have achieved great success in solving various complex control problems. However, multi-agent reinforcement learning remains challenging both in its theoretical analysis…
Inspired by biological swarms, robotic swarms are envisioned to solve real-world problems that are difficult for individual agents. Biological swarms can achieve collective intelligence based on local interactions and simple rules; however,…
Cooperative transport is a striking phenomenon where multiple agents join forces to transit a payload too heavy for the individual. While social animals such as ants are routinely observed to coordinate transport at scale, reproducing the…
A cooperative robot swarm is a collective of computationally-limited robots that share a common goal. Each robot can only interact with a small subset of its peers, without knowing how this affects the collective utility. Recent advances in…
We present a method for the control of robot swarms using two subsets of robots: a larger group of simple, oblivious robots (which we call the workers) that is governed by simple local attraction forces, and a smaller group (the guides)…
In this paper, we use simulated swarms of robots to further explore the aggregation dynamics generated by these simple individual mechanisms. Our objective is to study the introduction of "informed robots", and to study how many of these…
In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a robust motion formation distributed control algorithm for a team of mobile robots. The primary task for the team is to form a geometric shape, which can be freely translated and…
Despite their growing popularity, swarms of robots remain limited by the operating time of each individual. We present algorithms which allow a human to sculpt a swarm of robots into a shape that persists in space perpetually, independent…
Interesting and efficient collective behavior observed in multi-robot or swarm systems emerges from the individual behavior of the robots. The functional space of individual robot behaviors is in turn shaped or constrained by the robot's…