Related papers: Impossibility of Self-Organized Aggregation withou…
Robots have been steadily increasing their presence in our daily lives, where they can work along with humans to provide assistance in various tasks on industry floors, in offices, and in homes. Automated assembly is one of the key…
Several interesting problems in multi-robot systems can be cast in the framework of distributed optimization. Examples include multi-robot task allocation, vehicle routing, target protection, and surveillance. While the theoretical analysis…
We consider a Gathering problem for n autonomous mobile robots with persistent memory called light in an asynchronous scheduler (ASYNC). It is well known that Gathering is impossible when robots have no lights in basic common models, if the…
A team consisting of an unknown number of mobile agents, starting from different nodes of an unknown network, possibly at different times, have to meet at the same node. Agents are anonymous (identical), execute the same deterministic…
We consider a variant of the crash-fault gathering problem called stand-up indulgent gathering (SUIG). In this problem, a group of mobile robots must eventually gather at a single location, which is not known in advance. If no robots crash,…
The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis states that consciousness is a substrate-free functional property of computational systems capable of second-order perception. I propose a research program to investigate this idea in silico by studying…
This report surveys results on distributed systems comprising mobile agents that are identical and anonymous, oblivious and interact solely by adjusting their motion according to the relative location of their neighbours. The agents are…
In this work, we investigate swarm self-clustering, where robots autonomously organize into spatially coherent groups using only local sensing and decision-making, without external commands, global positioning, or inter-robot communication.…
A classification is a surjective mapping from a set of objects to a set of categories. A classification aggregation function aggregates every vector of classifications into a single one. We show that every citizen sovereign and independent…
In this paper, we consider folding assembly as an assembly primitive suitable for dual-arm robotic assembly, that can be integrated in a higher level assembly strategy. The system composed by two pieces in contact is modelled as an…
The design (shape) of a robot is usually decided before the control is implemented. This might limit how well the design is adapted to a task, as the suitability of the design is given by how well the robot performs in the task, which…
We investigate algorithmic control of a large swarm of mobile particles (such as robots, sensors, or building material) that move in a 2D workspace using a global input signal (such as gravity or a magnetic field). We show that a maze of…
In this paper, we solve the local gathering problem of a swarm of $n$ indistinguishable, point-shaped robots on a two dimensional grid in asymptotically optimal time $\mathcal{O}(n)$ in the fully synchronous $\mathcal{FSYNC}$ time model.…
Whether a robot can perform some specific task depends on several aspects, including the robot's sensors and the plans it possesses. We are interested in search algorithms that treat plans and sensor designs jointly, yielding…
In this paper, we investigate the possibility to deterministically solve the gathering problem (GP) with weak robots (anonymous, autonomous, disoriented, deaf and dumb, and oblivious). We introduce strong multiplicity detection as the…
Building consistent distributed systems has largely depended on complex coordination strategies that are not only tricky to implement, but also take a toll on performance as they require nodes to wait for coordination messages. In this…
We consider the problem of multi-robot path planning in a complex, cluttered environment with the aim of reducing overall congestion in the environment, while avoiding any inter-robot communication or coordination. Such limitations may…
In this paper we investigate the computational power of a set of mobile robots with limited visibility. At each iteration, a robot takes a snapshot of its surroundings, uses the snapshot to compute a destination point, and it moves toward…
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…
Leader election and arbitrary pattern formation are funda- mental tasks for a set of autonomous mobile robots. The former consists in distinguishing a unique robot, called the leader. The latter aims in arranging the robots in the plane to…