6 accepted papers
Robot swarms can be tasked with a variety of automated sensing and inspection applications in aerial, aquatic, and surface environments. In this paper, we study a simplified two-outcome surface inspection task. We task a group of robots to inspect and collectively classify a 2D surface section based…
Groups of robots can be tasked with identifying a location in an environment where a feature cue is past a threshold, then disseminating this information throughout the group – such as identifying a high-enough elevation location to place a communications tower. This is a continuous-cue target searc…
Social insects successfully create bridges, rafts, nests and other structures out of their own bodies and do so with no centralized control system, simply by following local rules. For example, while traversing rough terrain, army ants (genus Eciton) build bridges which grow and dissolve in response…
Creating accurate models of stochastically self-assembling systems is a key step in developing control strategies, centralized or distributed, for the self-assembly process. This paper comparatively studies several aspects of developing probabilistic models for programmable self-assembling systems o…
Several self-assembly systems have been developed in recent years, where depending on the capabilities of the building blocks and the controlability of the environment, the assembly process is guided typically through either a fully centralized or a fully distributed control approach. In this work,…
Fluid-mediated programmable stochastic self-assembly offers promising means to formation of target structures capable of a variety of functionalities. While miniaturized building blocks allow for finer resolutions in such structures, as well as access to unconventional environments, they can only be…