72 . Collective Manipulation and Construction

Many practical applications can make use of robot collectives that can manipulate objects and construct structures. Examples include applications in warehousing, truck loading and unloading, transporting large objects in industrial environments, and assembly of large-scale structures. Creating such systems, however, can be challenging. When collective robots work together to manipulate physical objects in the environment, their interactions necessarily become more tightly coupled. This need for tight coupling can lead to important control challenges, since actions by some robots can directly interfere with those of other robots. This chapter explores techniques that have been developed to enable robot swarms to effectively manipulate and construct objects in the environment. The focus in this chapter is on decentralized manipulation and construction techniques that would likely scale to large robot swarms (at least 10 robots), rather than approaches aimed primarily at smaller teams that attempt the same objectives. This chapter first discusses the swarm task of object transportation; in this domain, the objective is for 72.1 Object Transportation .......................... 1395 72.1.1 Transport by Pushing ................. 1396 72.1.2 Transport by Grasping . ............... 1397 72.1.3 Transport by Caging ................... 1400 72.2 Object Sorting and Clustering ............... 1401 72.3 Collective Construction and Wall Building ................................ 1402 72.4 Conclusions ......................................... 1404 References ................................................... 1404