This research instrumentation enables research projects in:
- Self-Reconfiguring Robotics - Distributed Manipulation with MEMS Devices - Distributed Control for Massively Parallel Reconfiguring Robot Systems, and - Self-Reconfiguring MEMS Robots
This award supports on-going research in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College and contributes to simulation facilities (for design and control) and physical hardware (for robotics experiments). The Department will purchase computing and fabrication equipment which will be dedicated to support the aforementioned projects: Stratasys system, workstations, MotionStar motion capture system, etc. The goal of this research project is to build self-reconfiguring robotics systems at the mini and MEMS scale, and to develop a science-based for planning and controlling highly distributed reconfigurable robot systems. Mini and MEMS self-configuring robots that employ the principles of self-organization and self-assembly to combine structure with function will be designed and built. The equipment will be used for the research mentioned, including in particular: (1) developing self-configuring mini-robot systems; (2) developing massively parallel control algorithms for MEMS devices; (3) developing novel algorithms for distributed control of massively parallel reconfiguring robot systems; and (4) combining the results on massively-parallel micro-fabricated MEMS actuators and self-reconfiguring systems to design, fabricate, control and program self-reconfiguring micro-robot systems, built using MEMS technology. These advances in reconfigurable robotics science will greatly enhance the capabilities of distributed robot systems.
