Pierre Thalamy

• Doctor of Computer Science and Software Engineer
• PhD Student at Franche-Comté Électronique Mécanique Thermique et Optique - Sciences et Technologies

While researchers envision exciting applications for metamorphic systems like programmable matter, current solutions to the shape formation problem are still a long way from meeting their requirements. To dive deeper into this issue, we propose an extensive survey of the current state of the art of self/reconfiguration algorithms and underlying mod...

The self-reconfiguration of large swarms of modular robotic units from one object into another is an intricate problem whose critical parameter that must be optimized is the time required to perform a transformation. Various optimizations methods have been proposed to accelerate transformations, as well as techniques to engineer the shape itself, s...

This paper addresses the self-reconfiguration problem in large-scale modular robots for the purpose of shape formation for object representation. It aims to show that this process can be accelerated without compromising on the visual aspect of the final object, by creating an internal skeleton of the shape using the previously introduced sandboxing...

Humans have always been on a quest to master their environment. But with the arrival of our digital age, an emerging technology now stands as the ultimate tool for that purpose: Programmable Matter. While any form of matter that can be programmed to autonomously react to a stimulus would fit that label, its most promising substrate resides in modul...

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...

Programmable matter based on modular self-reconfigurable robots could stand as the ultimate form of display system, through which humans could not only see the virtual world in 3D, but manipulate it and interact with it through touch. These systems rely on self-reconfiguration processes to reshape themselves and update their representation, using m...

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...

Distributed self-reconfiguration in large-scale modular robots is a slow process and increasing its speed a major challenge. In this article, we propose an improved and asynchronous version of a previously proposed distributed self-reconfiguration algorithm to build a parametric scaffolding structure. This scaffold can then be coated to form the de...

In the context of large distributed modular robots, self-reconfigura-tion is the process of having modules, seen as autonomous agents, acting together and moving to transform the morphology of their physical arrangement to produce a desired shape. However, due to motion constraints, the number of modules that can move concurrently is greatly limite...