Assembly Order Planning for Modular Structures By Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems

Coordinated multi-agent robotic construction provides a means to build infrastructure in extreme environments. Planning methods are important to understanding and achieving the scope of such applications. Here, we focus on the NASA Automated Reconfigurable Mission Adaptive Digital Assembly Systems (ARMADAS) model, which includes passive lightweight structural modules and small robots that traverse the structure. We present an algorithm for calculating a build plan for robots under the constraints of this type of system. We evaluate the quality of this plan experimentally. Many of the techniques we use can be applied to any robotic assembly system whose robots perform locomotion over the structure that they are building.