Huddle: Parallel Shape Assembly using Decentralized, Minimalistic Robots
This addresses the challenge of scalable and robust shape assembly in robotics, with incremental improvements in decentralization and minimalism.
The paper tackles the problem of forming arbitrarily shaped assemblies using decentralized robots, achieving a 107-robot assembly with a minimalistic algorithm that ensures no unreachable states or gaps.
We propose a novel algorithm for forming arbitrarily shaped assemblies using decentralized robots. By relying on local interactions, the algorithm ensures there are no unreachable states or gaps in the assembly, which are global properties. The in-assembly robots attract passing-by robots into expanding the assembly via a simple implementation of signaling and alignment. Our approach is minimalistic, requiring only communication between attached, immediate neighbors. It is motion-agnostic and requires no pose localization, enabling asynchronous and order-independent assembly. We prove the algorithm's correctness and demonstrate its effectiveness in forming a 107-robot assembly.