Related papers: Frontier-led Swarming: Robust Multi-Robot Coverage…
In this paper, we address the problem of collision avoidance for a swarm of UAVs used for continuous surveillance of an urban environment. Our method, LSwarm, efficiently avoids collisions with static obstacles, dynamic obstacles and other…
A hybrid map representation, which consists of a modified generalized Voronoi Diagram (GVD)-based topological map and a grid-based metric map, is proposed to facilitate a new frontier-driven exploration strategy. Exploration frontiers are…
Efficient coordination of multiple robots for coverage of large, unknown environments is a significant challenge that involves minimizing the total coverage path length while reducing inter-robot conflicts. In this paper, we introduce a…
Drawing inspiration from flight behavior in biological settings (e.g. territorial battles in dragonflies, and flocking in starlings), this paper demonstrates two strategies for coverage and flocking. Using earlier theoretical studies on…
We present a set of metrics intended to supplement designer intuitions when designing swarm-robotic systems, increase accuracy in extrapolating swarm behavior from algorithmic descriptions and small test experiments, and lead to faster and…
Future applications in environmental monitoring, delivery of services and transportation of goods motivate the study of deployment and partitioning tasks for groups of autonomous mobile agents. These tasks are achieved by recent coverage…
Harmful marine spills, such as algae blooms and oil spills, damage ecosystems and threaten public health tremendously. Hence, an effective spill coverage and removal strategy will play a significant role in environmental protection. In…
We present controllers that enable mobile robots to persistently monitor or sweep a changing environment. The changing environment is modeled as a field which grows in locations that are not within range of a robot, and decreases in…
Swarm intelligence is the collective behavior emerging in systems with locally interacting components. Because of their self-organization capabilities, swarm-based systems show essential properties for handling real-world problems such as…
The applicability of the swarm robots to perform foraging tasks is inspired by their compact size and cost. A considerable amount of energy is required to perform such tasks, especially if the tasks are continuous and/or repetitive.…
This paper investigates the automatic exploration problem under the unknown environment, which is the key point of applying the robotic system to some social tasks. The solution to this problem via stacking decision rules is impossible to…
Swarm systems constitute a challenging problem for reinforcement learning (RL) as the algorithm needs to learn decentralized control policies that can cope with limited local sensing and communication abilities of the agents. While it is…
This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…
Localized communication in swarms has been shown to increase swarm effectiveness in some situations by allowing for additional opportunities for cooperation. However, communication and utilization of potentially outdated information is also…
In this paper, we study the circle formation problem by multiple autonomous and homogeneous disc-shaped robots (also known as fat robots). The goal of the robots is to place themselves on the periphery of a circle. Circle formation has many…
We consider the following variant of the two dimensional gathering problem for swarms of robots: Given a swarm of $n$ indistinguishable, point shaped robots on a two dimensional grid. Initially, the robots form a closed chain on the grid…
A leader-follower framework is proposed for multi-robot navigation of large scale teams where the leader agents corral the follower agents. A group of leaders is modeled as a 2D deformable object where discrete masses (i.e., leader robots)…
Most studies in swarm robotics treat the swarm as an isolated system of interest. We argue that the prevailing view of swarms as self-sufficient, independent systems limits the scope of potential applications for swarm robotics. A robot…
Biologically inspired strategies have long been adapted to swarm robotic systems, including biased random walks, reaction to chemotactic cues and long-range coordination. In this paper we apply analysis tools developed for modeling…
The continuous monitoring by drone swarms remains a challenging problem due to the lack of power supply and the inability of drones to land on uneven surfaces. Heterogeneous swarms, including ground and aerial vehicles, can support longer…