Radhika Nagpal

TL;DR: A system that demonstrates programmable self-assembly of complex two-dimensional shapes with a thousand-robot swarm is reported, enabled by creating autonomous robots designed to operate in large groups and to cooperate through local interactions and by developing a collective algorithm for shape formation that is highly robust to the variability and error characteristic of large-scale decentralized systems.

TL;DR: An algorithm is presented for creating a reasonably accurate local coordinate system without the use of global control, globally accessible beacon signals, or accurate estimates of inter-sensor distances, which is robust and automatically adapts to the failure or addition of sensors.

TL;DR: Kilobot is a low-cost robot designed to make testing collective algorithms on hundreds or thousands of robots accessible to robotics researchers, and allows a single user to easily operate a large Kilobot collective.

TL;DR: Newton’s language Regiment, also a functional language, is designed to gather streams of data from regions of the amorphous computer and accumulate them at a single point, which allows Regiment to provide region-wide summary functions that are difficult to implement in Proto.

TL;DR: This work presents a multi-agent construction system inspired by mound-building termites, solving an inverse problem of predicting high-level results given low-level rules; the approach via a physical realization with three autonomous climbing robots limited to onboard sensing.