Magnetic Milli-Robot Swarm Platform: A Safety Barrier Certificate Enabled, Low-Cost Test Bed

Swarms of microand milli-sized robots have the potential to advance biological micro-manipulation, microassembly and manufacturing, and provide an ideal platform for studying large swarm behaviors and control. Due to their small size and low cost, tens to hundreds of micro/milli robots can function in parallel to perform a task that otherwise would be too cumbersome or costly for a larger macroscopic robot. Here, we demonstrate a scalable system and modular circuit architecture for controlling and coordinating the motion of >10's of magnetic micro/milli robots. By modifying the concepts of safety barrier certificates to our magnetic robot hardware, we achieve minimally invasive, collision-free, 2D position control (x, y) of up to N = 16 robots in a low-cost tabletop (288 mm × 288 mm) magnetic milli-robot platform with up to 288 degrees of freedom. We show that the introduction of random dithering can achieve a 100% success rate (i.e., no deadlocking), enabling the system to serve as a platform for the study of various swarm-like behaviors or multi-agent robotic coordination.