Related papers: Morphological computation and decentralized learni…

The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…

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…

In swarm robotics, just as for an animal swarm in Nature, one of the aims is to reach and maintain a desired configuration. One of the possibilities for the team, to reach this aim, is to see what its neighbours are doing. This approach…

Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…

Mean-shift-based approaches have recently emerged as a representative class of methods for robot swarm shape assembly. They rely on image-based target-shape representations to compute local density gradients and perform mean-shift…

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…

This paper presents a novel approach that allows a swarm of heterogeneous robots to produce simultaneously segregative and flocking behaviors using only local sensing. These behaviors have been widely studied in swarm robotics and their…

Swarm behaviour engineering is an area of research that seeks to investigate methods and techniques for coordinating computation and action within groups of simple agents to achieve complex global goals like pattern formation, collective…

The biologically-inspired swarm paradigm is being used to design self-organizing systems of locally interacting artificial agents. A major difficulty in designing swarms with desired characteristics is understanding the causal relation…

We present the first decentralized multi-copter flock that performs stable autonomous outdoor flight with up to 10 flying agents. By decentralized and autonomous we mean that all members navigate themselves based on the dynamic information…

Collective movement inspired by animal groups promises inherited benefits for robot swarms, such as enhanced sensing and efficiency. However, while animals move in groups using only their local senses, robots often obey central control or…

Autonomous robot swarms must be able to make fast and accurate collective decisions, but speed and accuracy are known to be conflicting goals. While collective decision-making is widely studied in swarm robotics research, only few works on…

Collective intelligence and autonomy of robot swarms can be improved by enabling the individual robots to become aware they are the constituent units of a larger whole and what is their role. In this study, we present an algorithm to enable…

We present a number of powerful local mechanisms for maintaining a dynamic swarm of robots with limited capabilities and information, in the presence of external forces and permanent node failures. We propose a set of local continuous…

Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics…

Internal computational models of physical bodies are fundamental to the ability of robots and animals alike to plan and control their actions. These "self-models" allow robots to consider outcomes of multiple possible future actions,…

In the literature, a distributed consensus protocol by which a connected swarm of agents can generate artistic patterns in 2-dimensional space is proposed. Motivated by this protocol, in this paper, we design the parameters of this protocol…

Musculoskeletal robots offer intrinsic compliance and flexibility, providing a promising paradigm for versatile locomotion. However, existing research typically relies on models with fixed muscle physiological parameters. This static…

This paper introduces collaborating robots which provide the possibility of enhanced task performance, high reliability and decreased. Collaborating-bots are a collection of mobile robots able to self-assemble and to self-organize in order…

Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done…