Related papers: PuzzleBots: Physical Coupling of Robot Swarms
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…
The current state of electronic component miniaturization coupled with the increasing efficiency in hardware and software allow the development of smaller and compact robotic systems. The convenience of using these small, simple, yet…
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…
Designing robotic systems that can change their physical form factor as well as their compliance to adapt to environmental constraints remains a major conceptual and technical challenge. To address this, we introduce the Granulobot, a…
Programmable matter (PM) is a form of matter capable of dynamically altering its physical properties, such as shape or density, through programmable means. From a robotics perspective, PM can be realized as a distributed system consisting…
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…
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,…
Consider a swarm of particles controlled by global inputs. This paper presents algorithms for shaping such swarms in 2D using boundary walls. The range of configurations created by conforming a swarm to a boundary wall is limited. We…
Social organisms which construct nests consisting of tunnels and chambers necessarily navigate confined and crowded conditions. Unlike low-density collectives like bird flocks and insect swarms, in which hydrodynamic and statistical…
A key requirement in robotics is the ability to simultaneously self-localize and map a previously unknown environment, relying primarily on onboard sensing and computation. Achieving fully onboard accurate simultaneous localization and…
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…
This paper presents a novel methodology that allows a swarm of robots to perform a cooperative transportation task. Our approach consists of modeling the swarm as a {\em Gibbs Random Field} (GRF), taking advantage of this framework's…
Autonomous swarms of robots can bring robustness, scalability and adaptability to safety-critical tasks such as search and rescue but their application is still very limited. Using semi-autonomous swarms with human control can bring robot…
In this work, we present an algorithm for robot replacement to increase the operational time of a multi-robot payload transport system. Our system comprises a group of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots traversing on a known trajectory. We…
Many swarm robotics tasks consist of multiple conflicting objectives. This research proposes a multi-objective evolutionary neural network approach to developing controllers for swarms of robots. The swarm robot controllers are trained in a…
This paper introduces HoloBots, a mixed reality remote collaboration system that augments holographic telepresence with synchronized mobile robots. Beyond existing mixed reality telepresence, HoloBots lets remote users not only be visually…
Drawing inspiration from honeybee swarms' nest-site selection process, we assess the ability of a kilobot robot swarm to replicate this captivating example of collective decision-making. Honeybees locate the optimal site for their new nest…
We present a deep reinforcement learning-based framework for automatically discovering patterns available in any given initial configuration of fat robot swarms. In particular, we model the problem of collision-less gathering and mutual…
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…
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…