Related papers: State complexes for metamorphic robots
Interest in designing, manufacturing, and using autonomous robots has been rapidly growing during the most recent decade. The main motivation for this interest is the wide range of potential applications these autonomous systems can serve…
Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robot (MSRR) systems are a class of robots capable of forming higher-level robotic systems by altering the topological relationships between modules, offering enhanced adaptability and robustness in various…
Emergent properties in distributed systems arise due to timing unpredictability; asynchronous state evolution within each sub-system may lead the macro-system to faulty meta-states. Empirical validation of correctness is often prohibitively…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
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…
This paper studies a class of multi-robot coordination problems where a team of robots aim to reach their goal regions with minimum time and avoid collisions with obstacles and other robots. A novel numerical algorithm is proposed to…
In this paper, we propose a whole-body planning framework that unifies dynamic locomotion and manipulation tasks by formulating a single multi-contact optimal control problem. We model the hybrid nature of a generic multi-limbed mobile…
Controlling large-scale particle or robot systems is challenging because of their high dimensionality. We use a centralized stochastic approach that allows for optimal control at the cost of a central element instead of a decentralized…
How do we move a robot efficiently from one position to another? To answer this question, we need to understand its configuration space, a 'map' where we can find every possible position of the robot. Unfortunately, these maps are very…
There is a belief that complexity and chaos are essential for adaptability. But life deals with complexity every moment, without the chaos that engineers fear so, by invoking goal-directed behaviour. Goals can be programmed. That is why…
We consider the theoretical model of Crystalline robots, which have been introduced and prototyped by the robotics community. These robots consist of independently manipulable unit-square atoms that can extend/contract arms on each side and…
If robots are to become ubiquitous, they will need to be able to adapt to complex and dynamic environments. Robots that can adapt their bodies while deployed might be flexible and robust enough to meet this challenge. Previous work on…
In this paper, we propose a novel design of a hybrid mobile robot with controllable stiffness and deformable shape. Compared to conventional mobile agents, our system can switch between rigid and compliant phases by solidifying or melting…
Complex multibody legged robots can have complex rotational control challenges. In this paper, we propose a concise way to understand and formulate a \emph{whole-body orientation} that (i) depends on system configuration only and not a…
The human brain's plasticity allows for the integration of artificial body parts into the human body. Leveraging this, embodied systems realize intuitive interactions with the environment. We introduce a novel concept: embodied swarm…
We demonstrate how multiagent systems provide useful control techniques for modular self-reconfigurable (metamorphic) robots. Such robots consist of many modules that can move relative to each other, thereby changing the overall shape of…
Given a reconfigurable system X, such as a robot moving on a grid or a set of particles traversing a graph without colliding, the possible positions of X naturally form a cubical complex S(X). When S(X) is a CAT(0) space, we can explicitly…
Robots exhibit a rich variety of symmetries arising from their mechanical structure and the properties of their tasks. Although many robotics problems exhibit several symmetries simultaneously, existing approaches typically treat them in…
This paper establishes a general framework for describing hybrid dynamical systems which is particularly suitable for numerical simulation. In this context, the data structures used to describe the sets and functions which comprise the…
Circumnavigation control is useful in real-world applications such as entrapping a hostile target. In this paper, we consider a heterogeneous multi-robot system where robots have different physical properties, such as maximum movement…