Stochastic strategies for a swarm robotic assembly system

13 years 11 months ago

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— We present a decentralized, scalable approach to assembling a group of heterogeneous parts into different products using a swarm of robots. While the assembly plans are predetermined, the exact sequence of assembly of parts and the allocation of subassembly tasks to robots are determined by the interactions between robots in a decentralized fashion in real time. Our approach is based on developing a us abstraction of the system derived from models of chemical reactions and formulating the strategy as a problem of selecting rates of assembly and disassembly. These rates are mapped onto probabilities that determine stochastic control policies for individual robots, which then produce the desired aggregate behavior. This top-down approach to determining robot controllers also allows us to optimize the rates at the level to achieve fast convergence to the speciﬁed target numbers of products. Because the method incorporates programs for assembly and disassembly, changes in demand can ...

Loic Matthey, Spring Berman, Vijay Kumar

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