Pierre THALAMY : " Distributed Algorithms and Advanced Modeling Approaches for Fast and Efficient Object Construction Using a Modular Self-reconfigurable Robotic System."

Thesis of Pierre Thalamy : " Distributed Algorithms and Advanced Modeling Approaches for Fast and Efficient Object Construction Using a Modular Self-reconfigurable Robotic System."

Even though the defense is public, the current sanitary measures impose a limit on the number of persons authorized in the auditorium at a given time.

Humans have always been on a quest to master their environment. But with the arrival of our digital age, an emerging technology now stands as the ultimate tool for that purpose: Programmable Matter. While any form of matter that can be programmed to autonomously react to a stimulus would fit that label, its most promising substrate resides in modular robotic systems. Such robotic systems are composed of interconnected, autonomous, and computationally simple modules that must coordinate through their motions and communications to achieve a complex common goal. Such programmable matter technology could be used to realize tangible and interactive 3D display systems that could revolutionize the ways in which we interact with the virtual world. Large-scale modular robotic systems with up to hundreds of thousands of modules can be used to form tangible shapes that can be rearranged at will. From an algorithmic point of view, however, this self-reconfiguration process is a formidable challenge due to the kinematic, communication, control, and time constraints imposed on the modules during this process. We argue in this thesis that there exist ways to accelerate the self-reconfiguration of programmable matter systems, and that a new class of reconfiguration methods with increased speed and specifically tailored to tangible display systems must emerge. We contend that such methods can be achieved by proposing a novel way of representing programmable matter objects, and by using a dedicated reconfiguration platform supporting selfreconfiguration. Therefore, we propose a framework to apply this novel approach on quasi-spherical modules arranged in a face-centered cubic lattice, and present algorithms to implement self-reconfiguration in this context. We analyze these algorithms and evaluate them on classes of shapes with increasing complexity, to show that our method enables previously unattainable reconfiguration times.

The defense will be held in English.

The thesis committee will have the following members:

Mr. Heiko HAMANN, Professor at the University of Lübeck, Germany,  Rapporteur
Mr. Kasper STØY, Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Rapporteur
Mr. Alcherio MARTINOLI, Associate Professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, Examiner
Mr. Nicolas ANDREFF, Professor at the University of Franche-Comté, Examiner
Mr. Julien BOURGEOIS, Professor at the University of Franche-Comté, Thesis Supervisor
Mr. Benoît PIRANDA, Associate Professor at the University of Franche-Comté, Thesis Cosupervisor