Massive Uniform Manipulation: Control Large Populations of Simple Robots with a Common Input Signal

Roboticists, biologists, and chemists are now producing large populations of simple robots, but controlling large populations of robots with limited capabilities is difficult, due to communication and onboard-computation constraints.

We investigate control of mobile robots that move in a 2D workspace, focusing on a model that uses broadcast control inputs specified in the global reference frame. (see video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p_XIad5-Cw )

In an obstacle-free workspace this system model is uncontrollable because it has only two controllable degrees of freedom---all robots receive the same inputs and move uniformly. We prove that adding a single obstacle can make the system controllable, for any number of robots. We provide a position control algorithm.

Authors: Aaron Becker and Golnaz Habibi, Rice University 2013

Code used for Fig. 3 in "Massive Uniform Manipulation: Controlling Large Populations of Simple Robots with a Common Input Signal" by Aaron Becker, Golnaz Habibi, Justin Werfel, Michael Rubenstein, and James McLurkin, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Nov 3-7 2013.

Paper Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px5RdSvGD2Q