Locomoting robots composed of immobile robots
This addresses the challenge of creating functional robotic materials from simple, low-cost components for applications in swarm robotics and adaptive systems, though it is incremental in building on prior work with smarticles.
The paper tackled the problem of achieving locomotion from ensembles of individually immobile robots by constructing a 'supersmarticle' from many smarticles in a bounding membrane, which harnessed internal collisions to achieve diffusive locomotion directed by light, resulting in biased movement as demonstrated experimentally.
Robotic materials are multi-robot systems formulated to leverage the low-order computation and actuation of the constituents to manipulate the high-order behavior of the entire material. We study the behaviors of ensembles composed of smart active particles, smarticles. Smarticles are small, low cost robots equipped with basic actuation and sensing abilities that are individually incapable of rotating or displacing. We demonstrate that a "supersmarticle", composed of many smarticles constrained within a bounding membrane, can harness the internal collisions of the robotic material among the constituents and the membrane to achieve diffusive locomotion. The emergent diffusion can be directed by modulating the robotic material properties in response to a light source, analogous to biological phototaxis. The light source introduces asymmetries within the robotic material, resulting in modified populations of interaction modes and dynamics which ultimately result in supersmarticle biased locomotion. We present experimental methods and results for the robotic material which moves with a directed displacement in response to a light source.