Related papers: Robot Swarms in an Uncertain World: Controllable A…

A robot operating in isolation needs to reason over the uncertainty in its model of the world and adapt its own actions to account for this uncertainty. Similarly, a robot interacting with people needs to reason over its uncertainty over…

We describe adaptive control algorithms whereby a chaotic dynamical system can be steered to a target state with desired characteristics. A specific implementation considered has the objective of directing the system to a state which is…

In crowded environments, individuals must navigate around other occupants to reach their destinations. Understanding and controlling traffic flows in these spaces is relevant for coordinating robot swarms and designing infrastructure for…

Controlling sensori-motor systems in higher animals or complex robots is a challenging combinatorial problem, because many sensory signals need to be simultaneously coordinated into a broad behavioural spectrum. To rapidly interact with the…

In collective robotic systems, the automatic generation of controllers for complex tasks is still a challenging problem. Open-ended evolution of complex robot behaviors can be a possible solution whereby an intrinsic driver for pattern…

Designing provably safe control is a core problem in trustworthy autonomy. However, most prior work in this regard assumes either that the system dynamics are known or deterministic, or that the state and action space are finite,…

For the robots to achieve a desired behavior, we can program them directly, train them, or give them an innate driver that makes the robots themselves desire the targeted behavior. With the minimal surprise approach, we implant in our…

Mobile robots navigating in crowds trained using reinforcement learning are known to suffer performance degradation when faced with out-of-distribution scenarios. We propose that by properly accounting for the uncertainties of pedestrians,…

Swarm robotic systems are mainly inspired by swarms of socials insects and the collective emergent behavior that arises from their cooperation at the lower lever. Despite the limited sensory ability, computational power, and communication…

Coordination of movement and configuration in robotic swarms is a challenging endeavor. Deciding when and where each individual robot must move is a computationally complex problem. The challenge is further exacerbated by difficulties…

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,…

Safety assurance is critical in the planning and control of robotic systems. For robots operating in the real world, the safety-critical design often needs to explicitly address uncertainties and the pre-computed guarantees often rely on…

Intelligent robots and machines are becoming pervasive in human populated environments. A desirable capability of these agents is to respond to goal-oriented commands by autonomously constructing task plans. However, such autonomy can add…

Most of the grand challenges of humanity today involve complex agent-based systems, such as epidemiology, economics or ecology. However, remains as a pending task the challenge of identifying the general principles underlying their…

In this work, we explore emergent behaviors by swarms of anonymous, homogeneous, non-communicating, reactive robots that do not know their global position and have limited relative sensing. We introduce a novel method that enables such…

Goals for planning problems are typically conceived of as subsets of the state space. However, for many practical planning problems in robotics, we expect the robot to predict goals, e.g. from noisy sensors or by generalizing learned models…

The safe control of multi-robot swarms is a challenging and active field of research, where common goals include maintaining group cohesion while simultaneously avoiding obstacles and inter-agent collision. Building off our previously…

In human-robot collaboration, the objectives of the human are often unknown to the robot. Moreover, even assuming a known objective, the human behavior is also uncertain. In order to plan a robust robot behavior, a key preliminary question…

Self-organized aggregation is a well studied behavior in swarm robotics as it is the pre-condition for the development of more advanced group-level responses. In this paper, we investigate the design of decentralized algorithms for a swarm…

Collective decision-making is an essential capability of large-scale multi-robot systems to establish autonomy on the swarm level. A large portion of literature on collective decision-making in swarm robotics focuses on discrete decisions…