14 accepted papers
Swarm robotics focuses on designing and coordinating large groups of relatively simple robots to perform tasks in a decentralised and collective manner. The swarm provides a resilient and flexible solution for many applications. However, contemporary swarm robots have a significant power problem in
This paper presents a framework for producing robotic fabrics using square lattice formations of interlinked Kilobot modules. The framework supports: (i) fabrics of arbitrary size and shape; (ii) different types of deformable links, namely springs and rods; (iii) easy plug-and-play reconfigurability
Simultaneously controlling multiple robot swarms is challenging for a single human operator. When involving multiple operators, however, they can each focus on controlling a specific robot swarm, which helps distribute the cognitive workload. They could also exchange some robots with each other in r…
This letter studies aerobatic tic-toc control of quadcopters. Tic-toc control enables rotorcraft to fly almost in the vertical plane rather than the horizontal plane. It is one of the most challenging manoeuvrers to achieve autonomously. The problem has to our knowledge not yet been studied for quad
Involving human operators to support swarms of robots can be beneficial to address increasingly complex scenarios. However, the shared control between multiple operators remains a challenge, especially where communication between the operators is not available. This paper studies the problem of form…
Searching for a lost teammate is an important task for multirobot systems. We present a variant of rapidly-expanding random trees (RRT) for generating search paths based on a probabilistic belief of the target teammate's position. The belief is updated using a hidden Markov model built from knowledg…
Supervisory Control Theory (SCT) provides a formal framework for controlling discrete event systems. It has recently been used to generate correct-by-construction controllers for swarm robotics systems. Current SCT frameworks are limited, as they support only (private) events that are observable wit…
Modular reconfigurable robots are touted for their flexibility, as their bodies can assume a wide range of shapes. A particular challenge is to make them move efficiently in 3D without compromising the scalability of the system. This paper proposes decentralized and fully reactive controllers for po…
We study the problem of controlling a swarm of anonymous, mobile robots to cooperatively cover an unknown two-dimensional space. The novelty of our proposed solution is that it is applicable to extremely simple robots that lack run-time computation or storage. The solution requires only a single bit…
Multirobot coverage is the problem of planning paths for several identical robots such that the combined regions traced out by the robots completely cover their environment. We consider the problem of multirobot coverage with the objective of minimizing the mission time, which depends on the number…
A canonical problem for swarms of agents is to collectively choose one of multiple options in their environment. We present a novel control strategy for solving this problem—the first to be free of arithmetic computation. The agents do not communicate with each other nor do they store run-time infor
As communication is important for cooperation, teams of mobile robots need a way to re-establish a wireless connection if they get separated. We develop a method for mobile robots to maintain a belief of each other's positions using locally available information. They can use their belief to plan pa…
This paper introduces the concept of Modular Hydraulic Propulsion, in which a modular robot that operates in a fluid environment moves by routing the fluid through itself. The robot's modules represent sections of a hydraulics network. Each module can move fluid between any of its faces. The modules
This paper presents OpenSwarm, a lightweight easy-to-use open-source operating system. To our knowledge, it is the first operating system designed for and deployed on miniature robots. OpenSwarm operates directly on a robot's microcontroller. It has a memory footprint of 1 kB RAM and 12 kB ROM. Open…