Roombots—Towards Decentralized Reconfiguration with Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robotic Metamodules

Locomotion through Reconfiguration based on Motor Primitives for Roombots Self-Reconfigurable Modular Robots

We present the hardware and reconfiguration experiments for an autonomous self-reconfigurable modular robot called Roombots (RB). RB were designed to form the basis for self-reconfigurable furniture. Each RB module contains three degrees of freedom that have been carefully selected to allow a single module to reach any position on a 2-dimensional grid and to overcome concave corners in a 3-dime...

Intelligent User Interface for Roombots

Roombots are self-reconfigurable modular robots designed to study robotic reconfiguration and adaptive locomotion. One of the main goals of this platform is to be used as adaptive furniture inside human living spaces such as homes or offices. For this reason, instead of the classical Graphical User Interface methods used up to now, we propose a novel and more natural way of interaction with the...

Controlled Module Density Helps Reconfiguration Planning

In modular reconfigurable systems, individual modules are capable of limited motion due to blocking and connectivity constraints, yet the entire system has a large number of degrees of freedom. The combination of these two facts makes motion planning for such systems exceptionally challenging. In this paper we present two results that shed some light on this problem. First we show that, for a r...

A characterization of the reconfiguration space of self-reconfiguring robotic systems

Metamodule Control for the ATRON Self-Reconfigurable Robotic System

This paper presents an approach for distributed control for the individual modules in the ATRON self-reconfigurable robotic system. The ATRON is a lattice-type module, which has a single degree of freedom. The system is reconfigured using metamodules, which are simple, consisting of only three modules. But they have far higher capabilities than a single module, because they can crawl relatively...