Building Robot Swarms

Published:

The Robotarium: Open-Access Swarm Robotics

The Robotarium at Georgia Tech is the world’s first remotely accessible swarm robotics testbed. As a founding member, I helped build infrastructure that lets researchers worldwide run experiments on real robots—no hardware purchase required.

Key features:

  • Fleet of GRITSBot X differential-drive robots
  • Automatic charging and position tracking
  • Safety through control barrier functions
  • Remote access via web interface

Impact: Users from every continent except Antarctica have run experiments, making swarm robotics research accessible to labs without dedicated hardware.

Brushbots: A robust low cost robot platform

Brushbots are low-cost vibration-driven robots that using brushes and vibration motors as a mechanism of locomotion. Due to their simplicity and robustness to collisions and impact, they are ideal as a STEAM educational platform.

Despite their simplicity, Brushbot swarms exhibit rich collective behaviors. We developed models connecting individual vibration dynamics to emergent swarm patterns, showing how simple local rules produce complex global behaviors.

Publications

  • IEEE Control Systems Magazine, 2020
    The Robotarium: Globally Impactful Opportunities, Challenges, and Lessons Learned in Remote-Access, Distributed Control of Multi-Robot Systems
    S. Wilson, P. Glotfelter, L. Wang, S. Mayya, G. Notomista, M. Mote, M. Egerstedt
    IEEE

  • IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2019
    A Study of a Class of Vibration-Driven Robots: Modeling, Analysis, Control and Design of the Brushbot
    G. Notomista, S. Mayya, A. Mazumdar, S. Hutchinson, M. Egerstedt
    IEEE | arXiv

  • IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2019
    Non-Uniform Robot Densities in Vibration Driven Swarms Using Phase Separation Theory
    S. Mayya, G. Notomista, D. Shell, S. Hutchinson, M. Egerstedt
    IEEE

Videos