Related papers: Fast Reconfiguration for Programmable Matter
Consider the problem of planning collision-free motion of $n$ objects in the plane movable through contact with a robot that can autonomously translate in the plane and that can move a maximum of $m \leq n$ objects simultaneously. This…
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…
This paper investigates Path planning Among Movable Obstacles (PAMO), which seeks a minimum cost collision-free path among static obstacles from start to goal while allowing the robot to push away movable obstacles (i.e., objects) along its…
Shape-morphing metamaterials enable adaptive structures capable of complex functional deformations, with applications ranging from reconfigurable structures and soft robotics to medical devices. However, their design remains challenging due…
We present a decoupled algorithm for motion planning for a collection of unit-balls moving among polyhedral obstacles in $\mathbb{R}^d$, for any $d \ge 2$. We assume that the robots have revolving areas in the vicinity of their start and…
We present a distributed framework for predicting whether a planned reconfiguration step of a modular robot will mechanically overload the structure, causing it to break or lose stability under its own weight. The algorithm is executed by…
This work studies rearrangement problems involving the sorting of robots or objects in stack-like containers, which can be accessed only from one side. Two scenarios are considered: one where every robot or object needs to reach a…
FPGAs provide a flexible and efficient platform to accelerate rapidly-changing algorithms for computer vision. The majority of existing work focuses on accelerating image classification, while other fundamental vision problems, including…
Magnetic soft robots embedded with hard magnetic particles enable untethered actuation via external magnetic fields, offering remote, rapid, and precise control, which is highly promising for biomedical applications. However, designing such…
We present progress on the problem of reconfiguring a 2D arrangement of building material by a cooperative group of robots. These robots must avoid collisions, deadlocks, and are subjected to the constraint of maintaining connectivity of…
Embodied action planning is a core challenge in robotics, requiring models to generate precise actions from visual observations and language instructions. While video generation world models are promising, their reliance on pixel-level…
This paper presents Particle-based Object Manipulation (Prompt), a new approach to robot manipulation of novel objects ab initio, without prior object models or pre-training on a large object data set. The key element of Prompt is a…
Studying the manipulation of deformable linear objects has significant practical applications in industry, including car manufacturing, textile production, and electronics automation. However, deformable linear object manipulation poses a…
The rapid evolution of next-generation communications and the Internet of Things (IoT) has catalyzed an urgent demand for governing expansive spatial environments as functional electromagnetic (EM) entities. However, deterministically…
The simulation of large ensembles of particles is usually parallelized by partitioning the domain spatially and using message passing to communicate between the processes handling neighboring subdomains. The particles are represented as…
Robot manipulation in cluttered environments often requires complex and sequential rearrangement of multiple objects in order to achieve the desired reconfiguration of the target objects. Due to the sophisticated physical interactions…
Imagine a swarm of terrestrial robots that can explore an environment, and, upon completion of this task, reconfigure into a spherical ball and roll out. This dimensional change alters the dynamics of locomotion and can assist them to…
The sliding square model is a widely used abstraction for studying self-reconfigurable robotic systems, where modules are square-shaped robots that move by sliding or rotating over one another. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed…
The Arbitrary Pattern Formation problem asks for a distributed algorithm that moves a set of autonomous mobile robots to form any arbitrary pattern given as input. The robots are assumed to be autonomous, anonymous and identical. They…
Optical molecular tomographic imaging is to reconstruct the concentration distribution of photon-molecular probes in a small animal from measured photon fluence rates. The localization and quantification of molecular probes is related to…