CAREER: Massive Uniform Manipulation: Algorithmic and Control Theoretic Foundations for Large Populations of Simple Robots Controlled by Uniform Inputs

University Of Houston, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

Robotic manipulation at the micro- and nano-scale can fundamentally transform disease treatment and the assembly of small objects. The goal of this project is to precisely deliver materials and assemble structures from the bottom-up. This precision manipulation must be coupled with a large population of manipulators to enable rapid progress. The potential impact is broad: large populations of micro-manipulators could provide targeted therapy, perform minimally invasive surgery, and engineer tissue. However, the small size of micro- and nano-robots severely limits their computation, sensing, and communication capabilities. This project will design new techniques for centralized control under the constraint that every robot receives exactly the same input commands. This proposal introduces massive manipulation to solve this problem. Massive manipulation uses a shared input to drive large populations of robots to arbitrary goal states. The unifying theme is using obstacles to efficiently control the shape, arrangement, and position of the swarm. Fortunately, in vivo environments are rich in obstacles, and artificial workspaces can be engineered to exploit these techniques. Two broad techniques are applied: 1.) Designing feedback controllers for controlling swarm configuration, manipulation through obstacles, and multi-part assembly. These controllers will learn from human-user data collected from the citizen-science site SwarmControl.net. 2.) Algorithmic techniques for massively-parallel assembly, efficient aggregation, and reliable coverage. Control laws and algorithms will be validated with analytical models, extensive simulations, and scaled hardware experiments using 100 or more kilobot robots. These scaled hardware experiments enable rapid reconfiguration and emulating a variety of micro-scale dynamic models provided by collaborators.