André Naz

University of Franche-Comté | UFC · Institut FEMTO-ST

Robotics research needs complex hardware and software that is why simulation is often view as an alternative for testing. Large scale self-reconfiguring modular robotic systems needs a scalable simulation environment which cannot be physics-based.

Simulation is one of the most important tools for robotics research, as it serves several crucial purposes such as prototyping, learning, avoiding dispensable hardware costs, or studying future systems that cannot be fabricated yet. Large scale self-reconfiguring modular robotic systems are an instance of such systems. Yet, current modular robotic...

Robotics research needs complex hardware and software that is why simulation is often view as an alternative for testing. Large scale self-reconfiguring modular robotic systems needs a scalable simulation environment which cannot be physics-based. This paper presents VisibleSim, an open-source behavioral simulator for lattice-based modular robots t...

Among the diversity of the existing modular robotic systems, we consider in this paper the subset of distributed modular robotic ensembles composed of resource-constrained identical modules that are organized in a lattice structure and which can only communicate with neighboring modules. These modular robotic ensembles form asynchronous distributed...

Modular robots form autonomous distributed systems in which modules use communications to coordinate their activities in order to achieve common goals. The complexity of distributed algorithms is generally expressed as a function of network properties, e.g., the number of nodes, the number of links and the radius/diameter of the system. In this pap...

In this paper, we propose the Modular Robot Time Protocol (MRTP), a network-wide time synchronization protocol for modular robots (a class of distributed embedded systems) with neighbor-to-neighbor communications and potentially low-precision clocks. Our protocol achieves its performance by combining several mechanisms: central time master election...

Technological advances especially in the miniaturization of robotic devices foreshadow the emergence of large-scale ensembles of small-size resource-constrained robots that distributively cooperate to achieve complex tasks (e.g., modular self-reconfigurable robots, swarm robotic systems, distributed microelectromechanical systems, etc.). These ense...

Modular robots form autonomous distributed systems in which modules use communications to coordinate their activities in order to achieve common goals. The complexity of distributed algorithms is generally expressed as a function of network properties, e.g., the number of nodes, the number of links and the radius/diameter of the system. In this pap...

Modular self-reconfigurable robots are composed of independent connected modules which can self-rearrange their connectivity using processing, communication and motion capabilities, in order to change the overall robot structure. In this paper, we consider rolling cylindrical modules arranged in a two-dimensional vertical hexagonal lattice. We prop...

Programmable matter i.e. matter that can change its physical properties, more likely its shape according to an internal or an external action is a good example of a cybermatics component. As it links a cyberized shape to real matter, it is a straight example of cyber-physical conjugation. But, this interaction between virtual and real worlds needs...

Many distributed algorithms require a specific role to be played by a leader, a single node in the system. The choice of this node often has a direct impact on the performance. In particular, selecting a central node as the leader can significantly improve algorithm efficiency. Classical distributed algorithms require global information about the c...

In this paper, we propose the Modular Robot Time Protocol (MRTP), a network-wide time synchronization protocol for modular robots. Our protocol achieves its performance by combining several mechanisms: central time master election, low-level time-stamping and clock skew compensation using linear regression. We evaluate our protocol on the Blinky Bl...

Modular robots are composed of many independent connected modules which are able to achieve common goals through communications. Many distributed algorithms have better performance if the modules that have to communicate with all the others, are placed at the center of the system. In this paper, we propose ABC-Center, an iterative algorithm for ele...

The following report describes our work on clock synchronization protocol for embedded systems in the project COordination and COmputation in Distributed Intelligent MEMS (CO 2 Dim) [2] led by the Optimization, Mobility, NetworkIng (OMNI) team at Femto-ST. CO 2 Dim is a partnership project with the Institute for Research in IT and Random Systems (I...