Scalable self-assembly and self-repair in a collective of robots

A collective of robots can together complete a task that is beyond the capabilities of any of its individual robots. One property of a robotic collective that allows it to complete such a task is the shape of the collective. In this paper, we present a distributed control method, called DASH, to ena...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems pp. 1484 - 1489
Main Authors Rubenstein, M., Wei-Min Shen
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2009
Subjects
Bridges
Distributed control
Intelligent robots
Mobile robots
Proportional control
Robust control
Self-assembly
Shape control
USA Councils
Wheels
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ISBN9781424438037
1424438039
ISSN2153-0858
DOI10.1109/IROS.2009.5354716

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Summary:A collective of robots can together complete a task that is beyond the capabilities of any of its individual robots. One property of a robotic collective that allows it to complete such a task is the shape of the collective. In this paper, we present a distributed control method, called DASH, to enable a collective of robots to robustly and consistently form and maintain a pre-defined shape. This control method allows the shape that is formed to be at a scale proportional to the number of robots in the collective. If this collective shape is damaged through the un-controlled movement, removal, or addition of some members of the collective, the existing members will recover the desired shape, proportional to the new number of robots in the collective. We also analyze this control method in terms of class of acceptable shapes and discuss the convergence to the desired shape.
ISBN:9781424438037
1424438039
ISSN:2153-0858
DOI:10.1109/IROS.2009.5354716