Building Blocks for Multi-Robot Construction

One notable capability of social insect colonies that has traditionally inspired distributed robot systems is their construction activity. In this paper, I describe a system of simple, identical, autonomous robots able to build two-dimensional structures of arbitrary design by rearranging blocks of building material into desired shapes. Structure design is specified compactly as a high-level geometric program; robots translate this program into physical form via their fixed behavioral programming. Robots are interchangeable both within and between construction projects, and need not be individually reprogrammed between dissimilar projects. Such a construction team could be used as the first stage in a system for remote building of structures, laying out the floor plan that a more sophisticated system could extend upwards.