Related papers: Morphological computation and decentralized learni…

Swarming behavior, where coherent motion emerges from the interactions of many mobile agents, is ubiquitous in physics and biology. Moreover, there are many efforts to replicate swarming dynamics in mobile robotic systems which take…

Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…

This paper proposes a novel learning-based control policy with strong generalizability to new environments that enables a mobile robot to navigate autonomously through spaces filled with both static obstacles and dense crowds of…

We present a decentralized and scalable approach for deployment of a robot swarm. Our approach tackles scenarios in which the swarm must reach multiple spatially distributed targets, and enforce the constraint that the robot network cannot…

Tailoring the design of robot bodies for control purposes is implicitly performed by engineers, however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent and optimization of morphology (shape, material properties of robot bodies, etc.) is…

Collective behaviors such as swarming and flocking emerge from simple, decentralized interactions in biological systems. Existing models, such as Vicsek and Cucker-Smale, lack collision avoidance, whereas the Olfati-Saber model imposes…

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…

Applications of large-scale mobile multi-robot systems can be beneficial over monolithic robots because of higher potential for robustness and scalability. Developing controllers for multi-robot systems is challenging because the multitude…

Collective motion is one of the most fascinating phenomena observed in the nature. In the last decade, it aroused so much attention in physics, control and robotics fields. In particular, many studies have been done in swarm robotics…

We consider the problem of completely covering an unknown discrete environment with a swarm of asynchronous, frequently-crashing autonomous mobile robots. We represent the environment by a discrete graph, and task the robots with occupying…

We present CoMet, a novel approach for computing a group's cohesion and using that to improve a robot's navigation in crowded scenes. Our approach uses a novel cohesion-metric that builds on prior work in social psychology. We compute this…

Swarm robotics is envisioned to automate a large number of dirty, dangerous, and dull tasks. Robots have limited energy, computation capability, and communication resources. Therefore, current swarm robotics have a small number of robots,…

Smart City applications, such as traffic monitoring and disaster response, often use swarms of intelligent and cooperative drones to efficiently collect sensor data over different areas of interest and time spans. However, when the required…

Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…

Integrating robots into populated environments is a complex challenge that requires an understanding of human social dynamics. In this work, we propose to model social motion forecasting in a shared human-robot representation space, which…

While the animals' Fin-to-Limb evolution has been well-researched in biology, such morphological transformation remains under-adopted in the modern design of advanced robotic limbs. This paper investigates a novel class of overconstrained…

Due to its decentralised, distributed and scalable nature, swarm robotics has great potential for applications ranging from agriculture to environmental monitoring and logistics. Various swarm control methods and algorithms are currently…

We present a geometric design rule for size-controlled clustering of self-propelled particles. We show that active particles that tend to rotate under an external force have an intrinsic, signed parameter with units of curvature which we…

What if a robot could rethink its own morphological representation to better meet the demands of diverse tasks? Most robotic systems today treat their physical form as a fixed constraint rather than an adaptive resource, forcing the same…

The safe control of multi-robot swarms is a challenging and active field of research, where common goals include maintaining group cohesion while simultaneously avoiding obstacles and inter-agent collision. Building off our previously…