Collective Construction

Motivation:
Ever since the dawn of robotics scientists have strived to create robots able to help us through our daily chores to make life a little easier. Considering the explorative nature of humans it can therefore come as no surprise to hear that many have also dreamt of creating robots with the ability to construct living quarters in environments that are too hostile for people themselves to do the work.

Experience:
Justin Werfel has carried out extensive research of algorithms and simulations in this area, whereas my master's project concerned itself with the hardware aspects of the same challenge. In this project we combine our efforts in making a fully functioning colony of construction robots. This work takes place in the self-organizing systems research lab under professor Radhika Nagpal.

Design:
Nature provides us with impressive examples of animal construction: many species of termites build complex mounds several orders of magnitude larger than themselves. Inspired by termites and their building activities, our goal is to develop swarm construction systems in which large numbers of autonomous robots build human-scale structures according to desired specifications.

TERMES is a first step toward this goal of automated construction by swarms of robots. The system comprises mobile robots and specialized passive building blocks; the robots can autonomously manipulate the blocks, use them to build structures potentially much larger than themselves, and maneuver on these structures as well as in unstructured environments with relatively rough terrain.

Progress:
As of January 2012 two robots have autonomously completed a nine-block staircase collectively. (Previous tests have shown one robot autonomously building a 10-block staircase more 15 times its own volume.) Furthermore the ultrasound system has been adapted to include range detection to allow both robots to circle the perimeter of the structure on ground level.

Publications:
TERMES: An Autonomous Robotic System for Three-Dimensional Collective Construction (Pdf)
Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS), 2011

Distributed Multi-Robot Algorithms for the TERMES 3D Collective Construction System (Pdf)
Modular Robotics Workshop, Intl. Conference on Robots and Systems (IROS), Sept 2011.

Movies: http://www.youtube.com/ssrlab0/

Old Prototypes

Robot and blocks used in the project of Justin Werfel