Programmable Self-Disassembly for Shape Formation in Large-Scale Robot Collectives

Melvin Gauci et. al

Abstract- We present a method for a large-scale robot collective to autonomously
form a wide range of user-specified shapes. In contrast to most existing work, our
method uses a subtractive approach rather than an additive one, and is the first such
method to be demonstrated on robots that operate in continuous space. An initial
dense, stationary configuration of robots distributively forms a coordinate system,
and each robot decides if it is part of the desired shape. Non-shape robots then remove
themselves from the configuration using a single external light source as a
motion guide. The subtractive approach allows for a higher degree of motion parallelism
than additive approaches; it is also tolerant of much lower-precision motion.
Experiments with 725 Kilobot robots allow us to compare our method against an
additive one that was previously evaluated on the same platform. The subtractive
method leads to higher reliability and an order-of-magnitude improvement in shape
formation speed.

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