# Internal Localization of Modular Robot Ensembles

In Workshop on Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robotics at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) '07

Stanislav Funiak, Padmanabhan Pillai, Jason D. Campbell, and Seth Copen Goldstein

Oct 1990

## Abstract

@inproceedings{funiak-iros07,
author = {Funiak, Stanislav and Pillai, Padmanabhan and Campbell,
Jason D. and Goldstein, Seth Copen},
title = {Internal Localization of Modular Robot Ensembles},
booktitle = {Workshop on Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robotics at the
IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
(IROS) '07},
year = {2007},
month = {Oct},
abstract = {The determination of the relative position and pose of
every robot in a modular robotic ensemble is a necessary
preliminary step for most modular robotic tasks. Localization is
particularly important when the modules make local noisy
observations and are not significantly constrained by inter-robot
latches. In this paper, we propose a robust hierarchical approach
to the {\em internal localization} problem that uses normalized
cut to identify subproblems with small localization error. A key
component of our solution is a simple method to reduce the cost
of normalized cut computations. The result is a robust algorithm
that scales to large, non-homogeneous ensembles. We evaluate our
algorithm in simulation on ensembles of up to 10,000 modules,
demonstrating substantial improvements over prior work.},
keywords = {Claytronics, Probabilistic Inference, Sensing,
Localization, Distributed Algorithms},
url = {http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~claytronics/papers/funiak-iros07.pdf},
}