Scalable Self-Assembly and Self-Repair In A Collective Of Robots

Michael Rubenstein and Wei-Min Shen. Scalable Self-Assembly and Self-Repair In A Collective Of Robots. In Proc. 2009 IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, St. Louis, Missouri, USA, October 2009.

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Abstract

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 thiscollective 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.

BibTeX Entry

@InProceedings{rubenst2009scalable-self-assembly-self-repair,
  abstract	= {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.},
  address	= {St. Louis, Missouri, USA},
  author	= {Michael Rubenstein and Wei-Min Shen},
  booktitle	= iros-09,
  month		= oct,
  title		= {Scalable Self-Assembly and Self-Repair In A Collective Of Robots},
  year		= {2009}
}