Related papers: A Minimalist Controller for Autonomously Self-Aggr…
In this paper we consider a continuous-time anisotropic swarm model with an attraction/repulsion function and study its aggregation properties. It is shown that the swarm members will aggregate and eventually form a cohesive cluster of…
The problem of coordination without a priori information about the environment is important in robotics. Applications vary from formation control to search and rescue. This paper considers the problem of search by a group of solitary…
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,…
Many new methodologies for the control of large-scale multi-agent systems are based on macroscopic representations of the emerging system dynamics, in the form of continuum approximations of large ensembles. These techniques, that are…
In this paper, we present a heterogeneous robot swarm system that can physically couple with each other to form functional structures and dynamically decouple to perform individual tasks. The connection between robots can be formed with a…
The problem of robotic synchronisation and coordination is a long-standing one. Combining autonomous, computerised systems with unpredictable real-world conditions can have consequences ranging from poor performance to collisions and…
In the field of swarm robotics, one of the most studied problem is Gathering. It asks for a distributed algorithm that brings the robots to a common location, not known in advance. We consider the case of robots constrained to move along…
Robot swarms can effectively serve a variety of sensing and inspection applications. Certain inspection tasks require a binary classification decision. This work presents an experimental setup for a surface inspection task based on…
We present a number of powerful local mechanisms for maintaining a dynamic swarm of robots with limited capabilities and information, in the presence of external forces and permanent node failures. We propose a set of local continuous…
Multi-robot formation control enables robots to cooperate as a working group in completing complex tasks, which has been widely used in both civilian and military scenarios. Before moving to reach a given formation, each robot should choose…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have a great potential to support search tasks in unstructured environments. Small, lightweight, low speed and agile UAVs, such as multi-rotors platforms can incorporate many kinds of sensors that are…
Swarm robots offer fascinating opportunities to perform complex tasks beyond the capabilities of individual machines. Just as a swarm of ants collectively moves a large object, similar functions can emerge within a group of robots through…
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…
We investigate gathering algorithms for asynchronous autonomous mobile robots moving in uniform ring-shaped networks. Different from most work using the Look-Compute-Move (LCM) model, we assume that robots have limited visibility and…
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.…
Multi-robot manipulation tasks involve various control entities that can be separated into dynamically independent parts. A typical example of such real-world tasks is dual-arm manipulation. Learning to naively solve such tasks with…
Swarms of autonomous surface vehicles equipped with environmental sensors and decentralized communications bring a new wave of attractive possibilities for the monitoring of dynamic features in oceans and other waterbodies. However, a key…
Autonomous robot swarms must be able to make fast and accurate collective decisions, but speed and accuracy are known to be conflicting goals. While collective decision-making is widely studied in swarm robotics research, only few works on…
In this paper, we develop a control framework for the coordination of multiple robots as they navigate through crowded environments. Our framework comprises of a local model predictive control (MPC) for each robot and a social long…
While robot learning has demonstrated promising results for enabling robots to automatically acquire new skills, a critical challenge in deploying learning-based systems is scale: acquiring enough data for the robot to effectively…