Coordinating Massive Robot Swarms

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of how to coordinate the behavior of very large numbers of microrobots in order to assemble complex, hierarchically structured physical objects. The approach is patterned after morphogenetic processes during embryological development, in which masses of simple agents (cells) coordinate to produce complex three-dimensional structures. In order to ensure that the coordination mechanisms scale up to hundreds of thousands or millions of microrobots, the swarm is treated as a continuous mass using partial differential equations. The paper presents algorithms and simulations for assembling segmented structures (artificial spines and legs) and for routing artificial neural fiber bundles. Coordinating Massive Robot Swarms