Manufacturing Micro-Patterned Surfaces with Multi-Robot Systems
This work addresses the challenge of scalable manufacturing for micro-patterned surfaces, which have applications in drag reduction and hydrophobicity, by proposing a multi-robot coordination method.
The paper tackles the problem of manufacturing micro-patterned surfaces at scale by using multiple robots with patterning tools, demonstrating that this approach can lower the coefficient of friction of metallic surfaces.
Applying micro-patterns to surfaces has been shown to impart useful physical properties such as drag reduction and hydrophobicity. However, current manufacturing techniques cannot produce micro-patterned surfaces at scale due to high-cost machinery and inefficient coverage techniques such as raster-scanning. In this work, we use multiple robots, each equipped with a patterning tool, to manufacture these surfaces. To allow these robots to coordinate during the patterning task, we use the ergodic control algorithm, which specifies coverage objectives using distributions. We demonstrate that robots can divide complicated coverage objectives by communicating compressed representations of their trajectory history both in simulations and experimental trials. Further, we show that robot-produced patterning can lower the coefficient of friction of metallic surfaces. This work demonstrates that distributed multi-robot systems can coordinate to manufacture products that were previously unrealizable at scale.