Real-time obstacle avoidance for manipulators and mobile robots
International Journal of Robotics Research
From Tom Thumb to the Dockers: some experiments with foraging robots
Proceedings of the second international conference on From animals to animats 2 : simulation of adaptive behavior: simulation of adaptive behavior
Crystalline Robots: Self-Reconfiguration with Compressible Unit Modules
Autonomous Robots
Extended Stigmergy in Collective Construction
IEEE Intelligent Systems
Multirobot systems: a classification focused on coordination
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics
Simple components for a reconfigurable modular robotic system
IROS'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/RSJ international conference on Intelligent robots and systems
Roombots: reconfigurable robots for adaptive furniture
IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine
3-D graphical visualization for construction automation
ACMOS'09 Proceedings of the 11th WSEAS international conference on Automatic control, modelling and simulation
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Construction is difficult to automate because of its complexity. Introducing modularity into both structural components and a means of assembly solves the problem by simplifying the construction task. Based on this idea, we propose a novel concept of a fully automated construction system called the Automatic Modular Assembly System (AMAS). In this paper, we discuss the hardware system and distributed control method of AMAS. This system uses passive building blocks called “structure modules” and an assembler robot that is specialized to handle them. This “modular” concept drastically simplifies structural complexity. We have built a prototype model to evaluate its automatic construction capability. Then we introduce a distributed autonomous control for AMAS, which uses a gradient field to indicate the directions to the assembler robots. The gradient field is generated on the structure modules. To improve the efficiency, we introduce collision avoidance rules such as module relay and local negotiation via a blackboard. We also evaluate the overall performance of the distributed control with simulations.