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Particle computation: Designing worlds to control robot swarms with only global signals

Author(s)
Becker, Aaron; Demaine, Erik D.; Fekete, Sandor P.; McLurkin, James
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Abstract
Micro- and nanorobots are often controlled by global input signals, such as an electromagnetic or gravitational field. These fields move each robot maximally until it hits a stationary obstacle or another stationary robot. This paper investigates 2D motion-planning complexity for large swarms of simple mobile robots (such as bacteria, sensors, or smart building material). In previous work we proved it is NP-hard to decide whether a given initial configuration can be transformed into a desired target configuration; in this paper we prove a stronger result: the problem of finding an optimal control sequence is PSPACE-complete. On the positive side, we show we can build useful systems by designing obstacles. We present a reconfigurable hardware platform and demonstrate how to form arbitrary permutations and build a compact absolute encoder. We then take the same platform and use dual-rail logic to build a universal logic gate that concurrently evaluates AND, NAND, NOR and OR operations. Using many of these gates and appropriate interconnects we can evaluate any logical expression.
Date issued
2014-05
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100006
Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Journal
Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation
Becker, Aaron, Erik D. Demaine, Sandor P. Fekete, and James McLurkin. “Particle Computation: Designing Worlds to Control Robot Swarms with Only Global Signals.” 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (May 2014).
Version: Original manuscript
ISBN
978-1-4799-3685-4

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