Optimizing robotic swarm based construction tasks
This work addresses the challenge of making swarm robotics practical for real-world construction, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior methods.
The paper tackles the problem of scaling swarm robotics for construction tasks by combining existing approaches, resulting in a system that can construct given 2D shapes in an optimized manner.
Social insects in nature such as ants, termites and bees construct their colonies collaboratively in a very efficient process. In these swarms, each insect contributes to the construction task individually showing redundant and parallel behavior of individual entities. But the robotics adaptations of these swarm's behaviors haven't yet made it to the real world at a large enough scale of commonly being used due to the limitations in the existing approaches to the swarm robotics construction. This paper presents an approach that combines the existing swarm construction approaches which results in a swarm robotic system, capable of constructing a given 2 dimensional shape in an optimized manner.