Self-assembly of a swarm of autonomous boats into floating structures

This paper addresses the self-assembly of a large team of autonomous boats into floating platforms. We describe the design of individual boats, the systems concept, the algorithms, the software architecture and experimental results with prototypes that are 1:12 scale realizations of modified ISO shipping containers, with the goal of demonstrating self-assembly into large maritime structures such as air strips, bridges, harbors or sea bases. Each container is a robotic module capable of holonomic motion that can dock in a brick pattern to form arbitrary shapes. Over 60 modules were built of varying capability. The docking mechanism is designed to be robust to large disturbances that can be expected in the high seas. The docking mechanism also incorporates adjustable stiffness so that the conglomerate can comply to waves representative of sea state three, and have the ability to dynamically stiffen as required. The component modules for autonomous assembly, docking and simultaneous collision-free planning as well as the software architecture are presented along with the description of experimental verification.