Steering Micro-Robotic Swarm by Dynamic Actuating Fields

Conference paper (2016)

Authors

C.C. Wang Materials and Manufacturing - IDE
Research Group
Materials and Manufacturing (IDE) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2016 Q. Chao, J Yu, C. Dai, T Xu, L. Zhang, C.C. Wang, X. Jin
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487731
Time series Multi-robot systems Motion control Mobile robots Position control Microrobots
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

2016

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Industrial Design Engineering

Department

Sustainable Design Engineering

Research Group

Materials and Manufacturing

Abstract

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.