Distributed Manipulation and Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS)

Description

Recently, graduate student Jim Jennings, research associate Daniela Rus, graduate student Russell Brown, Professor Bruce Donald, and lab alumnus Jonathan Rees (now at MIT), developed a team of autonomous mobile robots that can perform sophisticated distributed manipulation tasks (such as moving furniture). The robots run robust SPMD protocols that are completely asynchronous and require no communication. Grad student Karl Böhringer, Professor Bruce Donald, and EE Professor Noel MacDonald, are building a massively parallel array of microactuators in the Cornell National Nanofabrication Laboratory. The array is a SCREAM chip containing over 11,000 actuators in 1 square centemeter, and can orient small parts without sensory feedback. Our microfabricated actuator arrays could be used to construct programmable parts-feeders (at any scale), or to build self-propelled IC's (walking VLSI chips.)

K.-F. Böhringer, B. R. Donald, and N. C. MacDonald, Single-Crystal Silicon Actuator Arrays for Micro Manipulation Tasks, IEEE Workshop on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS), San Diego, California (February 1996). (Accepted; to appear).

K.-F. Böhringer, B. R. Donald, and N. C. MacDonald, Classification and Lower Bounds for MEMS Arrays and Vibratory Parts Feeders : What Programmable Vector Fields Can (and Cannot) Do - Part I, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Minneapolis, Minnesota (April 1996). (Accepted; to appear).

K.-F. Böhringer, B. R. Donald, and N. C. MacDonald, New and Improved Manipulation Algorithms for MEMS Arrays and Vibratory Parts Feeders: What Programmable Vector Fields Can (and Cannot) Do - Part II, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Minneapolis, Minnesota (April 1996). (Accepted, To appear).

Distributed Robotic Manipulation: Experiments in Minimalism, in International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, (ISER) Stanford, CA (1995).

Moving Furniture with Teams of Automonous Mobile Robots, (with J. Jennings and D. Rus) in Proc.~IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan International Workshop on Intelligent Robots and Systems, (IROS) Pittsburgh, PA (1995).

Sensorless Manipulation Using Massively Parallel Micro-fabricated Actuator Arrays (with K.-F. Böhringer, R. Mihailovich, and Noel C. MacDonald), Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, San Diego, CA (May, 1994).
A demo and more detailed explanation.

. Program Mobile Robots in Scheme(with J. Rees) Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Nice, France (May, 1992), pp. 2681-2688.

Information Invariants for Distributed Manipulation (with J. Jennings and D. Rus) in The First Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, A. K. Peters, Boston, MA. ed. R. Wilson and J.-C.Latombe (1994).

Automatic Sensor Configuration for Task-Directed Planning (with Amy Briggs), Proceedings 1994 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, San Diego, CA (May 1994).

. Kinodynamic Motion Planning (with P. Xavier, J. Canny, and J. Reif) Journal of the ACM, Vol. 40, No. 5, Nov., 1993. pp. 1048-1066.

. I am writing a book entitled Information Invariants in Robotics. A draft of the first quarter of this book appeared as a paper in Artificial Intelligence. Here it is: Information Invariants in Robotics. Revised MS based on the paper "On Information Invariants in Robotics," Artificial Intelligence Vol. 72 (Jan, 1995) pp. 217-304.

Patrick Xavier, PhD 1992. Except for the thesis, these TR's are mostly superseded by three, more recent journal papers listed starting here.

More papers are avalable through the Cornell CS TR server. Pictures We have developed a team of small autonomous mobile robots that can move furniture around in our lab. <--- Click here for a group portrait of our robots. Click here to see a picture of Tommy and Lily mobot pushing a couch. Click here to see a picture of Tommy and Lily rotating a couch. Click here to see a picture of Tommy the mobile robot, drawn by Loretta Pompilio. Click here to see pictures of people and robots working in the lab. Our lab was on The Discovery Channel ("Beyond 2000") and you can find out more about it here. Other people and robots in the Cornell Robotics and Vision Laboratory. Cornell Robotics and Vision Laboratory home page.