Steering Micro-Robotic Swarm by Dynamic Actuating Fields

Steering Micro-Robotic Swarm by Dynamic Actuating Fields

Chao, Q.
Yu, J
Dai, C.
Xu, T
Zhang, L.
Wang, C.C. (TU Delft Materials and Manufacturing)
Jin, X.

2016

We present a general solution for steering microrobotic
swarm by dynamic actuating fields. In our approach, the
motion of micro-robots is controlled by changing the actuating
direction of a field applied to them. The time-series sequence
of actuating field’s directions can be computed automatically.
Given a target position in the domain of swarm, a governing
field is first constructed to provide optimal moving directions at
every points. Following these directions, a robot can be driven
to the target efficiently. However, when working with a crowd of
micro-robots, the optimal moving directions on different agents
can contradict with each other. To overcome this difficulty, we
develop a novel steering algorithm to compute a statistically
optimal actuating direction at each time frame. Following a
sequence of these actuating directions, a crowd of micro-robots
can be transported to the target region effectively. Our steering
strategy of swarm has been verified on a platform that generates
magnetic fields with unique actuating directions. Experimental
tests taken on aggregated magnetic micro-particles are quite
encouraging.

microrobots
mobile robots
motion control
multi-robot systems
position control
time series

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:37c4a76b-5bcb-45e5-98bb-e0095cf50748

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487731

IEEE Society, Piscataway

978-1-4673-8025-6

2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2016), 2016-05-16 → 2016-05-21, Stockholm, Sweden

Author accepted manuscript

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2016 Q. Chao, J Yu, C. Dai, T Xu, L. Zhang, C.C. Wang, X. Jin