Learning to Assemble Objects with a Robot Swarm

Nature provides us with a multitude of examples that show how swarms of simple agents are much richer in their abilities than a single individual. This insight is a main principle that swarm robotics tries to exploit. In the last years, large swarms of low-cost robots such as the Kilobots have become available. This allows to bring algorithms developed for swarm robotics from simulations to the real world. Recently, the Kilobots have been used for an assembly task with multiple objects: a human operator controlled a light source to guide the swarm of light-sensitive robots such that they successfully assembled an object of multiple parts. However, hand-coding the control of the light source for autonomous assembly is not straight forward as the interactions of the swarm with the object or the reaction to the light source are hard to model.