Tilt: The Video - Designing Worlds to Control Robot Swarms with Only Global Signals

Abstract

We present fundamental progress on the computational universality of swarms of micro- or nano-scale robots in complex environments, controlled not by individual navigation, but by a uniform global, external force. More specifically, we consider a 2D grid world, in which all obstacles and robots are unit squares, and for each actuation, robots move maximally until they collide with an obstacle or another robot. The objective is to control robot motion within obstacles, design obstacles in order to achieve desired permutation of robots, and establish controlled interaction that is complex enough to allow arbitrary computations. In this video, we illustrate progress on all these challenges: we demonstrate NP-hardness of parallel navigation, we describe how to construct obstacles that allow arbitrary permutations, and we establish the necessary logic gates for performing arbitrary in-system computations.