Self-assembly and self-repair of arbitrary shapes by a swarm of reactive robots: algorithms and simulations

Abstract

Self-assembly of active, robotic agents, rather than of passive agents such as molecules, is an emerging research field that is attracting increasing attention. Active self-assembly techniques are especially attractive at very small spatial scales, where alternative construction methods are unavailable or have severe limitations. Building nanostructures by using swarms of very simple nanorobots is a promising approach for manufacturing nanoscale devices and systems.The method described in this paper allows a group of simple, physically identical, identically programmed and reactive (i.e., stateless) agents to construct and repair polygonal approximations to arbitrary structures in the plane. The distributed algorithms presented here are tolerant of robot failures and of externally-induced disturbances. The structures are self-healing, and self-replicating in a weak sense. Their components can be re-used once the structures are no longer needed. A specification of vertices at relative positions, and the edges between them, is translated by a compiler into reactive rules for assembly agents. These rules lead to the construction and repair of the specified shape. Simulation results are presented, which validate the proposed algorithms.

A comprehensive conceptual and computational dynamics framework for Autonomous Regeneration Systems

“…Incidentally, regeneration has been popular in robotics as well. A swarm of robots has been programmed to construct and self-repair two-dimensional structures (Arbuckle & Requicha, 2010;Rubenstein et al, 2009). Inspired by biological stem cells, robotic stem cells are robots that have the capacity to self-organise and self-heal a damaged structure.…”

“…In recent years, there has also been an increasing interest in self-repair systems in robotics (Arbuckle & Requicha, 2010;Rubenstein, Sai, Chuong, & Shen, 2009). Some of these systems in a simple way use the concept of stem cells (Rubenstein et al, 2009).…”

Leader Election and Shape Formation with Self-organizing Programmable Matter

“…Every root aims at traveling around the line in a clockwise manner until it joins the line. As a root particle moves, the other particles in its tree follow in a worm-like fashion (i.e., via a series of handover operations) 5 . Before we give a detailed description of the algorithm, we provide some preliminaries.…”

Self-assembly Planning of a Shape by Regular Modular Robots

“…Although an individual robot is simple, swarm intelligence can make the group more powerful. Based on interactions in local area, a swarm of simple and identical agents can construct a polygon in the plane [3]. In addition to the polygon formation, self-assembly of a continuous-space shape was addressed in algorithms and physical system [4].…”