Assembly Planning for Magnetic Modular Cubes ICRA 2024

6-minute overview of motion planning algorithm for magnetic cubes controlled by a global magnetic field. The key insight is building a graph of possible build states, and using a depth-first-search of this graph to see what build order is most ikely.

This is the presentation video for paper "SE(2) Assembly Planning for Magnetic Modular Cubes" at https://2024.ieee-icra.org/
Magnetic modular cubes are cube-shaped bodies with embedded permanent magnets. The cubes are uniformly controlled by a global time-varying magnetic field. By Kjell Keune & Aaron Becker

A 2D physics simulator is used to simulate global control and the resulting continuous movement of magnetic modular cube structures. We develop local plans, closed-loop control algorithms for planning the connection of two structures at desired faces. The global planner generates a building instruction graph for a target structure that we traverse in a depth-first-search approach by repeatedly applying local plans.

We analyze how structure size and shape affect planning time. The planner solves 80% of the randomly created instances with up to 12 cubes in an average time of about 200 seconds.

Code available at: https://github.com/RoboticSwarmContro...