3D M-Blocks: Self-reconfiguring robots capable of locomotion via pivoting in three dimensions

Romanishin, John; Gilpin, Kyle; Claici, Sebastian; Rus, Daniela

doi:10.1109/icra.2015.7139450

Cited by 111 publications

(78 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Like many lattice-style modular systems, the assembler robot can only move on the structure modules, and not in an unstructured environment. M-blocks [6] form structures out of robot cubes which rotate over the structure, and can reconfigure between arbitrary 3D shapes, except those containing certain inadmissible sub-configurations [7]. Other related work in manipulation planning allows robots to carry out multi-step procedures to assemble furniture [8] or rearrange clutter surrounding a primary manipulation task [9].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimal Structure Synthesis for Environment Augmenting Robots

Tosun

Sung

McCloskey

et al. 2019

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

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Building structures can allow a robot to surmount large obstacles, expanding the set of areas it can reach. This paper presents a planning algorithm to automatically determine what structures a construction-capable robot must build in order to traverse its entire environment. Given an environment, a set of building blocks, and a robot capable of building structures, we seek a optimal set of structures (using a minimum number of building blocks) that could be built to make the entire environment traversable with respect to the robot's movement capabilities. We show that this problem is NP-Hard, and present a complete, optimal algorithm that solves it using a branch-and-bound strategy. The algorithm runs in exponential time in the worst case, but solves typical problems with practical speed. In hardware experiments, we show that the algorithm solves 3D maps of real indoor environments in about one minute, and that the structures selected by the algorithm allow a robot to traverse the entire environment. An accompanying video is available online at https://youtu.be/B9WM557NP44.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimal Structure Synthesis for Environment Augmenting Robots

Tosun

Sung

McCloskey

et al. 2019

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

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“…Another class of robots, inspired by termites [Werfel et al, 2014], build three-dimensional structures out of external building materials. Finally, the cube-shaped M-Blocks [Romanishin et al, 2015] construct aggregations out of their own bodies, using magnetism and angular momentum to climb on top of neighbors. These works represent examples from the emerging eld of multi-agent robotic systems built out of many inexpensive individual robots and utilizing control strategies that may include redundancies to overcome individual malfunctions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attraction, Dynamics, and Phase Transitions in Fire Ant Tower-Building

Nave

Mitchell

Dick

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Many insect species, and even some vertebrates, assemble their bodies to form multi-functional materials that combine sensing, computation, and actuation. The tower-building behavior of red imported re ants, Solenopsis invicta, presents a key example of this phenomenon of collective construction. While biological studies of collective construction focus on behavioral assays to measure the dynamics of formation and studies of swarm robotics focus on developing hardware that can assemble and interact, algorithms for designing such collective aggregations have been mostly overlooked. We address this gap by formulating an agent-based model for collective tower-building with a set of behavioral rules that incorporate local sensing of neighboring agents. We nd that an attractive force makes tower building possible. Next, we explore the trade-os between attraction and random motion to characterize the dynamics and phase transition of the tower building process. Lastly, we provide an optimization tool that may be used to design towers of specic shapes, mechanical loads, and dynamical properties such as mechanical stability and mobility of the center of mass. *

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“…The cubic modules presented in [5] are capable of forming structures in 3D, deploying magnetic latching and a lattice-based locomotion approach. These modules communicate over radio to a central supervisor which issues commands indicating the desired placement.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While intelligent building blocks can actively take part in the SA process and thus allow for distributed control approaches [2], [3], [4], [5], the SA process of passive building blocks can only be controlled through a centralized approach [6], [7], [8]. Centralized control approaches become 1.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterization and validation of a novel robotic system for fluid-mediated programmable stochastic self-assembly

Haghighat

Martinoli

2016

2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

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Abstract-Several self-assembly systems have been developed in recent years, where depending on the capabilities of the building blocks and the controlability of the environment, the assembly process is guided typically through either a fully centralized or a fully distributed control approach. In this work, we present a novel experimental system for studying the range of fully centralized to fully distributed control strategies. The system is built around the floating 3-cm-sized Lily robots, and comprises a water-filled tank with peripheral pumps, an overhead camera, an overhead projector, and a workstation capable of controlling the fluidic flow field, setting the ambient luminosity, communicating with the robots over radio, and visually tracking their trajectories. We carry out several experiments to characterize the system and validate its capabilities. First, a statistical analysis is conducted to show that the system is governed by reaction diffusion dynamics, and validate the applicability of the standard chemical kinetics modeling. Additionally, the natural tendency of the system for structure formation subject to different flow fields is investigated and corresponding implications on guiding the self-assembly process are discussed. Finally, two control approaches are studied: 1) a fully distributed control approach and 2) a distributed approach with additional central supervision exhibiting an improved performance. The formation time statistics are compared and a discussion on the generalization of the method is provided.

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3D M-Blocks: Self-reconfiguring robots capable of locomotion via pivoting in three dimensions

Cited by 111 publications

References 11 publications

Optimal Structure Synthesis for Environment Augmenting Robots

Optimal Structure Synthesis for Environment Augmenting Robots

Attraction, Dynamics, and Phase Transitions in Fire Ant Tower-Building

Characterization and validation of a novel robotic system for fluid-mediated programmable stochastic self-assembly

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