Programming and forming objects with modular robots to enable a programmable matter

4^th March 2020, 12:00
Prof. Abdallah Makhoul, Dr. Benoit Piranda, and Pierre Thalamy
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Abstract

Technological advances, especially in the miniaturization of robotic devices foreshadow the emergence of large-scale ensembles of small-size resource-constrained robots that distributively cooperate to achieve complex tasks. These ensembles are formed by independent, intelligent and communicating units which act as a whole ensemble that can be used to build programmable matter i.e. matter able to change its shape.

In our talk, we will present our research effort in building Programmable Matter (PM) based on modular robots. To do this, we use micro-technology to scale down the size of each element, and we study geometry, structure, actuation, power, electronics and integration. To manage the complexity of this kind of environment, we propose a complete environment including programmable hardware, a programming language, a compiler, a simulator, a debugger and distributed algorithms. In the second part of our talk we will present our distributed solution dedicated to leader election and particles identification in programmable matter. Furthermore, we present a new technique to speed up the self-reconfiguration of 3D Catom modules by engineering both the environment of the reconfiguration and the shape itself for maximum motion parallelization. We will show experiments and videos of our simulations performed on the VisibleSim modular robot simulator to demonstrate the efficiency of our methods.