Automated Self-Assembly of Large Maritime Structures by a Team of Robotic Boats

We present the methodology, algorithms, system design, and experiments addressing the self-assembly of large teams of autonomous robotic boats into floating platforms. Identical self-propelled robotic boats autonomously dock together and form connected structures with controllable variable stiffness...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on automation science and engineering 2015-07, Vol.12 (3), p.958-968
Main Authors: Paulos, James, Eckenstein, Nick, Tosun, Tarik, Jungwon Seo, Davey, Jay, Greco, Jonathan, Kumar, Vijay, Yim, Mark
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Assembly
Automation
Autonomous surface craft
Autonomous underwater vehicles
Boats
Computers
Control algorithms
Industrial robots
Manufacturing engineering
modular construction
modular robot
multirobot systems
Parallel processing
Planning
Robotics
Robots
Self assembly
self-reconfigurable
Software engineering
Systems design
Trajectory
Underwater robots
Winches
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Summary:We present the methodology, algorithms, system design, and experiments addressing the self-assembly of large teams of autonomous robotic boats into floating platforms. Identical self-propelled robotic boats autonomously dock together and form connected structures with controllable variable stiffness. These structures can self-reconfigure into arbitrary shapes limited only by the number of rectangular elements assembled in brick-like patterns. An O(m 2 ) complexity algorithm automatically generates assembly plans which maximize opportunities for parallelism while constructing operator-specified target configurations with m components. The system further features an O(n 3 ) complexity algorithm for the concurrent assignment and planning of trajectories from n free robots to the growing structure. Such peer-to-peer assembly among modular robots compares favorably to a single active element assembling passive components in terms of both construction rate and potential robustness through redundancy. We describe hardware and software techniques to facilitate reliable docking of elements in the presence of estimation and actuation errors, and we consider how these local variable stiffness connections may be used to control the structural properties of the larger assembly. Assembly experiments validate these ideas in a fleet of 0.5 m long modular robotic boats with onboard thrusters, active connectors, and embedded computers.
ISSN:1545-5955
1558-3783
DOI:10.1109/TASE.2015.2416678