Network Characterization of Lattice-Based Modular Robots with Neighbor-to-Neighbor Communications

Naz, Andre; Piranda, Benoît; Tucci, Thadeu; Goldstein, Seth Copen; Bourgeois, Julien

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-73008-0_29

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…In the former, round, rigid modules can move in six discrete steps around each other using switchable magnets. This is still an active research platform, especially in terms of controllers, power, connectors, and communication (Campbell et al, 2005 ; Kirby et al, 2007 ; Naz et al, 2018 ; Piranda and Bourgeois, 2018 ). The DONUts rely on a similar means of locomotion, but are compliant, simpler to manufacture, and have the potential to be teacherless.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scalable and Robust Fabrication, Operation, and Control of Compliant Modular Robots

et al. 2020

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A major goal of autonomous robot collectives is to robustly perform complex tasks in unstructured environments by leveraging hardware redundancy and the emergent ability to adapt to perturbations. In such collectives, large numbers is a major contributor to system-level robustness. Designing robot collectives, however, requires more than isolated development of hardware and software that supports large scales. Rather, to support scalability, we must also incorporate robust constituents and weigh interrelated design choices that span fabrication, operation, and control with an explicit focus on achieving system-level robustness. Following this philosophy, we present the first iteration of a new framework toward a scalable and robust, planar, modular robot collective capable of gradient tracking in cluttered environments. To support co-design, our framework consists of hardware, low-level motion primitives, and control algorithms validated through a kinematic simulation environment. We discuss how modules made primarily of flexible printed circuit boards enable inexpensive, rapid, low-precision manufacturing; safe interactions between modules and their environment; and large-scale lattice structures beyond what manufacturing tolerances allow using rigid parts. To support redundancy, our proposed modules have on-board processing, sensing, and communication. To lower wear and consequently maintenance, modules have no internally moving parts, and instead move collaboratively via switchable magnets on their perimeter. These magnets can be in any of three states enabling a large range of module configurations and motion primitives, in turn supporting higher system adaptability. We introduce and compare several controllers that can plan in the collective's configuration space without restricting motion to a discrete occupancy grid as has been done in many past planners. We show how we can incentively redundant connections to prevent single-module failures from causing collective-wide failure, explore bad configurations which impede progress as a result of the motion constraints, and discuss an alternative “naive” planner with improved performance in both clutter-free and cluttered environments. This dedicated focus on system-level robustness over all parts of a complete design cycle, advances the state-of-the-art robots capable of long-term exploration.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scalable and Robust Fabrication, Operation, and Control of Compliant Modular Robots

et al. 2020

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“…However intensive communication is often used as a way to simplify the planning process and prevent physical collision and other undesirable events from occurring, which is likely to still cause a massive energetic overhead due to the sheer volume of transmiting messages. Furthermore, because of the immense size of such distributed systems in conjunction with the limited memory size of modules, excessive communications could quickly overload the message queues of the modules and therefore have a dramatic effect on reconfiguration as a consequence of the subsequent message losses (Naz et al, 2018).…”

Section: On the Complexity Of Self-reconfigurationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Besides, the network aspect of the underlying hardware on which is based our vision of PM has to be carefully taken into account, as it has been shown that large lattice-based distributed systems relying exclusively on neighborto-neighbor communications are particularly at risk of latency and reliability issues. This is a result of the huge diameter of such systems coupled with a network high average distance, which together pose a serious design challenge to prospective algorithmic solutions (Naz et al, 2018).…”

Section: Self-reconfiguration Criteriamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The other main architecture type is lattice-type modular robots, composed of an ordered arrangement of modules, residing on a regular structure named a lattice. There exist a number of lattice structures, each based on a particular geometry of their cells, and differing by their packing-density, number of dimensions, and number of neighboring positions at a given location (Naz et al, 2018;Piranda and Bourgeois, 2018). In contrast with chain-type modular robots, there are still many open problems regarding lattice-based systems, especially on the control side.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A survey of autonomous self-reconfiguration methods for robot-based programmable matter

Thalamy

Piranda

Bourgeois

2019

Robotics and Autonomous Systems

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While researchers envision exciting applications for metamorphic systems like programmable matter, current solutions to the shape formation problem are still a long way from meeting their requirements. To dive deeper into this issue, we propose an extensive survey of the current state of the art of selfreconfiguration algorithms and underlying models in modular robotic and self-organizing particle systems. We identify three approaches for solving this problem and we compare the different solutions using a synoptic graphical representation. We then close this survey by confronting existing methods to our vision of programmable matter, and by discussing a number of future research directions that would bring us closer to making it a reality.

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“…The choice of the leader often has a direct impact on the performance. As the LMRs we target exhibit large-average-distance and large-diameter networks [29], a possible strategy is to select a center node, i.e., a node that has the minimum distance to all the other nodes. Indeed, this node is ideally located to communicate with all the others and this leads to better performance in many algorithms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electing an Approximate Center in a Huge Modular Robot with the k-BFS SumSweep Algorithm

Naz

Piranda

Bourgeois

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

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Among the diversity of the existing modular robotic systems, we consider in this paper the subset of distributed modular robotic ensembles composed of resourceconstrained identical modules that are organized in a lattice structure and which can only communicate with neighboring modules. These modular robotic ensembles that we name LMRs form asynchronous distributed embedded systems. In many algorithms dedicated to distributed system coordination, a specific role has to be played by a leader, i.e., a single node in the system. This leader can be elected using various criteria. A possible strategy is to elect a center node, i.e., a node that has the minimum distance to all the other nodes. Indeed, this node is ideally located to communicate with all the others and this leads to better performance in many algorithms. The contribution of this paper is to propose the k-BFS SumSweep algorithm designed to elect an approximate-center node. We evaluated our algorithm both on hardware modular robots and in a simulator for large ensemble of robots. Results show our algorithm is a good trade-off if accuracy is the main concern. Indeed, it is the most precise approximation algorithm for systems with less than 7,000 modules. In these systems, our algorithm exhibits a relative accuracy between 92% to 100%. Moreover the k-BFS SumSweep algorithm is reasonably efficient in terms of time and communication, and has a limited memory footprint.

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Network Characterization of Lattice-Based Modular Robots with Neighbor-to-Neighbor Communications

Cited by 7 publications

References 21 publications

Scalable and Robust Fabrication, Operation, and Control of Compliant Modular Robots

Scalable and Robust Fabrication, Operation, and Control of Compliant Modular Robots

A survey of autonomous self-reconfiguration methods for robot-based programmable matter

Electing an Approximate Center in a Huge Modular Robot with the k-BFS SumSweep Algorithm

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