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

Authors:
Michael Rubenstein;Wei-Min Shen
Affiliations:
Information Sciences Institute and Computer Science, Department at the University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA;Information Sciences Institute and Computer Science, Department at the University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA
Venue:
IROS'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/RSJ international conference on Intelligent robots and systems
Year:
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 this collective shape is damaged through the uncontrolled 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.