Self-assembly enables nature to build complex forms, from multicellular organisms to complex animal structures such as flocks of birds, through the interaction of vast numbers of limited and unreliable individuals. Creating this ability in engineered systems poses challenges in the design of both algorithms and physical systems that can operate at such scales. This work demonstrates programmable self-assembly of complex two-dimensional shapes with a thousand-robot swarm. This was enabled by creating autonomous robots designed to operate in large groups and to cooperate through local interactions and by developing a collective algorithm for shape formation that is highly robust to the variability and error characteristic of large-scale decentralized systems. This work advances the aim of creating artificial swarms with the capabilities of natural ones.
For more information, please see our recent publication in Science (an open access link to the article can be found by clicking the PDF link on this webpage), and the supplementary material.
AERobot (Affordable Education Robot) is a low-cost robot designed to introduce students of all ages to the fundamentals of programming and control of robots, with the hope of inspiring them to further pursue studies in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). We hope that AERobot?s low cost ($10.70 including assembly) will enable more students, especially those who could not normally afford to do so, to gain hands-on experience in robotics. In addition to robot design, we have created a software suite for the robot by modifying minibloqs, a graphical programming language, and created a 15 lesson curriculum for a student with no starting experience to learn the basics of programming flow and logic, the use of sensors and actuators, and to create robot behaviors.
In current robotics research there is a vast body of work on algorithms and control methods for groups of decentralized cooperating robots, called a swarm or collective. These algorithms are generally meant to control collectives of hundreds or even thousands of robots; however, for reasons of cost, time, or complexity, they are generally validated in simulation only, or on a group of a few tens of robots. To address this issue, we created Kilobot, a low-cost robot designed to make testing collective algorithms on hundreds or thousands of robots accessible to robotics researchers. To enable the possibility of large Kilobot collectives where the number of robots is an order of magnitude larger than the largest that exist today, each robot is made with $14 worth of parts and takes 5 minutes to assemble. Furthermore, the robot design allows a single user to easily oversee the operation of a large Kilobot collective, such as programming, powering on, and charging all robots, which would be difficult or impossible to do with many existing robotic systems.
The below videos show Kilobots being used for collective transport using a variety of control algorithms. For more details see the AAMAS2013 paper and the IROS2013 paper.
The following videos explain the Kilobot system and present some early demonstrations.
For my PhD thesis, I developed a control algorithm for a multi-robot system which guarantees that it can self-assemble and self-heal any connected shape desired. This control algorithm, called S-DASH, allows a group of decentralized robots to form the desired shape at a size proportional to the current number of robots without direct knowledge of that number. If the group shape is damaged by moving, adding, or removing some robots, S-DASH will cause the robot group to reform the desired shape at a size proportional to the new number of robots.
The following video shows an example of my thesis work on self-assembling and self-healing shapes. My thesis can be found here.