Extended Stigmergy in Collective Construction
IEEE Intelligent Systems
Anthills built to order: automating construction with artificial swarms
Anthills built to order: automating construction with artificial swarms
Robot Search in 3D Swarm Construction
SASO '07 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems
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IJCAI'05 Proceedings of the 19th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence
Stochastic strategies for a swarm robotic assembly system
ICRA'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international conference on Robotics and Automation
Simple components for a reconfigurable modular robotic system
IROS'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/RSJ international conference on Intelligent robots and systems
Development of top-down analysis of distributed assembly tasks
PerMIS '09 Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems
Stochastic modular robotic systems: a study of fluidic assembly strategies
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Macro Programming a Spatial Computer with Bayesian Networks
ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)
Robustness and stagnation of a swarm in a cooperative object recognition task
ICSI'11 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Advances in swarm intelligence - Volume Part I
On-line assembly planning for stochastically reconfigurable systems
International Journal of Robotics Research
Morphologies of self-organizing swarms in 3D swarm chemistry
Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
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We present a decentralized algorithmic approach to automatically building user-specified three-dimensional structures from modular units. Our bipartite system comprises passive units (blocks), responsible for embodying the structure and determining where further units can legally be attached, and active units (robots), responsible for transporting passive units. The algorithmic issues are correspondingly decomposed into two parts: (1) deciding where passive units may be attached; and (2) getting them to those locations. For the first part, we give simple, scalable rules for attachment and prove that they will reliably lead to the construction of any desired structure from a large class of three-dimensional shapes. For the second part, we compare three approaches: random movement, systematic search and gradient-following; each approach is successively faster but requires more communication overhead and/or unit capabilities. The system we describe enables guaranteed construction of desired structures using very simple agent algorithms, taking a high-level specification as the only required input. The topic of collective construction is related to the problems of programmed self-assembly and self-reconfiguration in modular robots, and the rules governing block attachment presented here may be usefully applied to such systems.