Related papers: Impossibility of Self-Organized Aggregation withou…
The problem of dispersion of mobile robots on a graph asks that $n$ robots initially placed arbitrarily on the nodes of an $n$-node anonymous graph, autonomously move to reach a final configuration where exactly each node has at most one…
The control and integration of distributed, multi-sensor perceptual systems is a complex and challenging problem. The observations or opinions of different sensors are often disparate incomparable and are usually only partial views. Sensor…
Thermostatically controlled loads such as refrigerators are exceptionally suitable as a flexible demand resource. This paper derives a decentralised load control algorithm for refrigerators. It is adapted from an existing continuous time…
Previous approaches to constructing abstractions for control systems rely on geometric conditions or, in the case of an interconnected control system, a condition on the interconnection topology. Since these conditions are not always…
Assembly of multi-part physical structures is both a valuable end product for autonomous robotics, as well as a valuable diagnostic task for open-ended training of embodied intelligent agents. We introduce a naturalistic physics-based…
The proliferation of robots in public spaces necessitates a deeper understanding of how these robots can interact with those they share the space with. In this paper, we present findings from video analysis of publicly deployed cleaning…
We study the problem of distributed control of large-scale robotic swarms which can be modeled as continuum densities evolving under the continuity equation. We propose a formalization of distributed controllers as (generally nonlinear)…
An effective human-robot collaborative process results in the reduction of the operator's workload, promoting a more efficient, productive, safer and less error-prone working environment. However, the implementation of collaborative robots…
Modularity in robotics holds great potential. In principle, modular robots can be disassembled and reassembled in different robots, and possibly perform new tasks. Nevertheless, actually exploiting modularity is yet an unsolved problem:…
Assembly of large scale structural systems in space is understood as critical to serving applications that cannot be deployed from a single launch. Recent literature proposes the use of discrete modular structures for in-space assembly and…
This paper considers the problem of maintaining global connectivity of a multi-robot system while executing a desired coordination task. Our approach builds on optimization-based feedback design formulations, where the nominal cost function…
We argue that hardware modularity plays a key role in the convergence of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We introduce a new approach for building robots that leads to more adaptable and capable machines. We present the concept of…
We consider a team of heterogeneous robots which are deployed within a common workspace to gather different types of data. The robots have different roles due to different capabilities: some gather data from the workspace (source robots)…
Consider a team of $k \leq n$ autonomous mobile robots initially placed at a node of an arbitrary graph $G$ with $n$ nodes. The dispersion problem asks for a distributed algorithm that allows the robots to reach a configuration in which…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
Applications, such as military and disaster response, can benefit from robotic collectives' ability to perform multiple cooperative tasks (e.g., surveillance, damage assessments) efficiently across a large spatial area. Coalition formation…
Multi-robot path planning is difficult due to the combinatorial explosion of the search space with every new robot added. Complete search of the combined state-space soon becomes intractable. In this paper we present a novel form of…
Humans have an impressive ability to solve complex coordination problems in a fully distributed manner. This ability, if learned as a set of distributed multirobot coordination strategies, can enable programming large groups of robots to…
Cooperative object transportation using multiple robots has been intensively studied in the control and robotics literature, but most approaches are either only applicable to omnidirectional robots or lack a complete navigation and…
In this position paper, we discuss how the use of a cognitive architecture based on unsupervised clustering (the Kohonen Self-Organizing Map) enables us to meet our goals of efficient action selection in a mobile robot. This architecture…