Control of Magnetic Microrobot Teams for Temporal Micromanipulation Tasks
This work solves the problem of independent control for microrobot teams in micromanipulation, which is incremental as it builds on existing optimal control synthesis with a novel sampling-based technique.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling magnetic microrobot teams for complex temporal micromanipulation tasks using Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas, achieving results that address large-scale planning problems unsolvable by existing methods and demonstrating potential in practical experiments.
In this paper, we present a control framework that allows magnetic microrobot teams to accomplish complex micromanipulation tasks captured by global Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. To address this problem, we propose an optimal control synthesis method that constructs discrete plans for the robots that satisfy both the assigned tasks as well as proximity constraints between the robots due to the physics of the problem. Our proposed algorithm relies on an existing optimal control synthesis approach combined with a novel sampling-based technique to reduce the state-space of the product automaton that is associated with the LTL specifications. The synthesized discrete plans are executed by the microrobots independently using local magnetic fields. Simulation studies show that the proposed algorithm can address large-scale planning problems that cannot be solved using existing optimal control synthesis approaches. Moreover, we present experimental results that also illustrate the potential of our method in practice. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first control framework that allows independent control of teams of magnetic microrobots for temporal micromanipulation tasks.