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Robotic Fabrics

Description: A plug-and-play framework for producing scalable, deformable modular robot entities.

  • Primary Functionality: Software used to run navigate the Kilobot swarm robotic fabric.
  • Target: Kilobot
  • Task: T5.3
  • Responsible: Genki Miyauchi

Overview

Robotic Fabrics is a plug-and-play framework for producing scalable, deformable modular robot entities. The software and hardware have been designed for a robotic fabric comprising up to 81 Kilobots that are connected using deformable links to move straight or turn left or right.

Software

The Kilobot controller can be found in software/.

  • forward_open-loop.c : Open-loop controller to make a single Kilobot move forward.
  • deformation-correcting.c : Straight motion controller proposed in Pratissoli et al. 2023 (paper, code). Each Kilobot measures the distance to its neighbors to detect the deformation in the lattice-structure and corrects its motion accordingly to maintain the shape of the structure.
  • turning_open-loop.c : Proposed turning controller executed on each Kilobot to make the robotic fabric follow a curved trajectory.

Supplementary videos

Experiment videos can be found here.

Citing Robotic Fabrics

If you use Robotic Fabrics (paper) in your research, please use the following BibTeX entry:

@article{obilikpa2025scalable,
    title = {Scalable Plug-and-Play Robotic Fabrics Based on Kilobot Modules},
    author = {Obilikpa, Stanley C. and Talamali, Mohamed S. and Miyauchi, Genki and Oyekan, John and Gro{\ss}, Roderich},
    journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)},
    volume = {10},
    number = {7},
    pages = {6832--6839},
    year = {2025},
    publisher = {IEEE},
    doi = {https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2025.3568313},
}