Recent Research

•"PCBot", is a minimalist robot that can precisely move on an orbital shake table using a bi-stable solenoid actuator built directly into its PCB. This allows the actuator to be built as part of the automated PCB manufacturing process, greatly reducing the impact it has on manual assembly. Thanks to this novel actuator design, PCBot has merely five major components and can be assembled in under 20 seconds, potentially enabling them to be easily mass-manufactured. For more details, see our IROS 2022 paper.




•"Shape Formation", the task of shape formation in robot swarms can often be reduced to two tasks, assigning goal locations to each robot and creating a collision-free path to that goal. We present a distributed algorithm that solves these tasks concurrently, enabling a swarm of robots to move and form a shape quickly and without collision. A user can specify a desired shape as an image, send that to a swarm of identically programmed robots, and the swarm will move all robots to goal locations within the desired shape. This algorithm was executed on a swarm of up to 1024 simulated robots and a swarm of 100 real robots, showing that it reliably converges to all robots forming the shape.For more details, see our T-RO 2020 paper.




•"FireAnt3D", is an updated version of the original fireant robot, but now able to move in 3D along structures of like robots. This includes an updated full-body continuous docks on a 3D robot, which is still able to attach anywhere onto other robots at any orientation, eliminating the need for alignment mechanisms and complex sensors. This is accomplished using novel dock designed with conductive plastic. For more details, see our IROS 2020 paper.




•"FireAnt", a new modular robot design that demonstrates full-body continuous docks, an attachment mechanism able to attach anywhere onto other robots at any orientation, eliminating the need for alignment mechanisms and complex sensors. This is accomplished using novel dock designed with conductive plastic. For more details, see our ICRA 2018 paper.




• Externally driven actuation for swarm robots: We designed a prototype robotic system that allows for externally powered motion in 2D without sacrificing individual autonomy, which simplifies the robot hardware, possibly enabling larger swarm sizes. This is accomplished using a table surface that is moving in an orbital fashion, and where robots can move to any point on the table surface simply through a series of carefully timed attachment and detachment steps. See our IROS 2016 paper for more details.




•Low Cost sensing for rotorcraft: Here we present a system that can allow for more natural swarming behaviors by enabling direct bearing and elevation sensing, as well as communication between nearby rotor-craft. This system takes advantage of the existing motion of the vehicles propellers, is low power, and can be adapted to existing vehicles with only simple modifications. See our IROS 2017 paper for more details.