Group-based control of large-scale micro-robot swarms with on-board Physical Finite-State Machines
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Li, Siyu; Zefran, Milos; Paprotny, Igor
- Source
- 2022 IEEE 18th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2022 IEEE 18th International Conference on. :524-530 Aug, 2022
- Subject
- Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Robotics and Control Systems
Fabrication
Uncertainty
Computer aided software engineering
Automata
Probabilistic logic
Controllability
Numerical models
- Language
- ISSN
- 2161-8089
An important problem in microrobotics is how to control a large group of microrobots with a global control signal. This paper focuses on controlling a large-scale swarm of MicroStressBots with on-board physical finite-state machines. We introduce the concept of group-based control, which makes it possible to scale up the swarm size while reducing the complexity both of robot fabrication as well as swarm control. We prove that the group-based control system is locally accessible in terms of the robot positions. We further hypothesize based on extensive simulations that the system is globally controllable. A nonlinear optimization strategy is proposed to control the swarm by minimizing control effort. We also propose a probabilistically complete collision avoidance method that is suitable for online use. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the proposed methods in simulations.