Collective Manipulation and Construction

Abstract

Many practical applications can make use of robot collectives that can manipulate objects and construct structures. Examples include applications in warehousing, truck loading and unloading, transporting large objects in industrial environments, and assembly of large-scale structures. Creating such systems, however, can be challenging. When collective robots work together to manipulate physical objects in the environment, their interactions necessarily become more tightly coupled. This need for tight coupling can lead to important control challenges, since actions by some robots can directly interfere with those of other robots. This chapter explores techniques that have been developed to enable robot swarms to effectively manipulate and construct objects in the environment. The focus in this chapter is on decentralized manipulation and construction techniques that would likely scale to large robot swarms (at least 10 Open image in new window robots), rather than approaches aimed primarily at smaller teams that attempt the same objectives. This chapter first discusses the swarm task of object transportation; in this domain, the objective is for robots to collectively move objects through the environment to a goal destination. The chapter then discusses object clustering and sorting, which requires objects in the environment to be aggregated at one or more locations in the environment. The final task discussed is that of collective construction and wall building, in which robots work together to build a prespecified structure. While these different tasks vary in their specific objectives for collective manipulation , they also have several commonalities. This chapter explores the state of the art in this area.