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This thesis lies at the crossroad of three research fields: heterogenous mobile collective robotics, autonomous construction with mobile robots and 3D printing. The main goal of this work is to implement and study an innovative way to interact and modify the environment using autonomous mobile robots. In a field where the state of the art is limited to few examples, we performed a review of the available raw materials and completed several tests in order to select the most appropriate material for autonomous construction. We have developed a modular mobile robotic platform enabling a large set of collective experiments. We present the realisation and characterisation of a raw material extrusion mechanism embeddable on a miniature mobile robot. This mechanism, combined with the developed robotic platform develops some advanced interaction capabilities such as extruding materials on walls or ceilings. It is also able to extrude materials on rough surfaces or construct free-standing structures. An experimentation shows that the proposed solution develops advanced autono-mous construction capabilities. A final experimentation is performed using heterogenous mobiles robots. It demonstrates that a multi-layers cooperation between two heterogenous robots increase the performances without impacting the system's robustness.
Aude Billard, Farshad Khadivar, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis
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