Related papers: Morphological computation and decentralized learni…
A spacially extended model of the collective behavior of a large number of locally acting organisms is proposed in which organisms move probabilistically between local cells in space, but with weights dependent on local morphogenetic…
Coordinating a team of robots to reposition multiple objects in cluttered environments requires reasoning jointly about where robots should establish contact, how to manipulate objects once contact is made, and how to navigate safely and…
The deployment of simple emergent behaviors in swarm robotics has been well-rehearsed in the literature. A recent study has shown how self-aggregation is possible in a multitask approach -- where multiple self-aggregation task instances…
Heterogeneous multi-robot systems feature significant adaptability for complex environments. However, effective collaboration that fully exploits the robots' potential remains a core challenge. This paper proposes a decentralized…
We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and…
In the late stages of terrestrial planet formation, pairwise collisions between planetary-sized bodies act as the fundamental agent of planet growth. These collisions can lead to either growth or disruption of the bodies involved and are…
Coordinating micro-robotic swarms in physiologically realistic, time-dependent fluid environments remains an unsolved challenge for biomedical and environmental applications. We present a hybrid Computational Fluid Dynamics -…
Robot swarms can be tasked with a variety of automated sensing and inspection applications in aerial, aquatic, and surface environments. In this paper, we study a simplified two-outcome surface inspection task. We task a group of robots to…
Designing controllers for robot swarms is challenging, because human developers have typically no good understanding of the link between the details of a controller that governs individual robots and the swarm behavior that is an indirect…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
Robot swarms offer the potential to serve a variety of distributed sensing applications. An interesting real-world application that stands to benefit significantly from deployment of swarms is structural monitoring, where traditional sensor…
This paper investigates the role of communication in improving coordination within robot swarms, focusing on a paradigm where learning and execution occur simultaneously in a decentralized manner. We highlight the role communication can…
Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…
In densely-packed robot swarms operating in confined regions, spatial interference -- which manifests itself as a competition for physical space -- forces robots to spend more time navigating around each other rather than performing the…
Building a distributed spatial awareness within a swarm of locally sensing and communicating robots enables new swarm algorithms. We use local observations by robots of each other and Gaussian Belief Propagation message passing combined…
The emerging collective motions of swarms of interacting agents are a subject of great interest in application areas ranging from biology to physics and robotics. In this paper, we conduct a careful analysis of the collective dynamics of a…
One of the most important promises of decentralized systems is scalability, which is often assumed to be present in robot swarm systems without being contested. Simple limitations, such as movement congestion and communication conflicts,…
It is challenging for a mobile robot to navigate through human crowds. Existing approaches usually assume that pedestrians follow a predefined collision avoidance strategy, like social force model (SFM) or optimal reciprocal collision…
Soft robotics holds transformative potential for enabling adaptive and adaptable systems in dynamic environments. However, the interplay between morphological and control complexities and their collective impact on task performance remains…
We present DisCo, a distributed algorithm for contact-rich, multi-robot tasks. DisCo is a distributed contact-implicit trajectory optimization algorithm, which allows a group of robots to optimize a time sequence of forces to objects and to…