This paper describes a system that takes real-time user input to direct a robot swarm. The user interface is via drawing, and the user can create a single drawing or an animation to be represented by robots. For example, the drawn input could be a stick figure, with the robots automatically adopting a physical configuration to represent the figure. Or the input could be an animation of a walkin...

The theory and design of effective interfaces for human interaction with multi-robot systems has recently gained significant interest. Robotic swarms are multi-robot systems where local interactions between robots and neighbors within their spatial neighborhood generate emergent collective behaviors. Most prior work has studied interfaces for human interaction with remote swarms, but swarms als...

Inspired by the simplicity of how nature solves its problems, this paper presents a novel approach that would enable a swarm of ant robotic agents (robots with limited sensing, communication, computational and memory resources) form a visual representation of distributed hazardous substances within an environment dominated by diffusion processes using a decentralized approach. Such a visual rep...

The field of robotics has expanded tremendously over last several decades. Researchers' attention has shifted from its early focus on industrial manipulators and individual mobile robot toward today's more challenging topics such as multi-robot systems, mobile sensor networks, and swarm robotics. Swarm Robotics is an emerging area which studies novel approaches to coordinate a large number of r...

This paper reports on the prediction of the expected positioning errors of robot manipulators due to the errors in their geometric parameters. A Swarm Intelligence (SI) based algorithm, which is known as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), has been used to generate error estimation functions. The experimental system used is a Motoman SK120 manipulator. The error estimation functions are based on...

Swarming and modular robotic locomotion are two disconnected behaviours that a group of small homogeneous robots can be used to achieve. The use of these two behaviours is a popular subject in robotics research involving search, rescue and exploration. However, they are rarely addressed as two behaviours that can coexist within a single robotic system. Here, we present a bio-inspired decision m...