The Biologically Inspired Robotics Group (BIRG) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) recently started a project on Modular Robotics for the future Learning Centre of the EPFL: Roombots, Modular Robotics for adaptive and self-organising furniture. It intends to design modular robots for furniture with ability for locomotion, self-assembling, self-organisation, self-reconf...

Introduction The key research questions in self-reconfiguring robotics are how to design and engineer robot systems capable of self-reconfiguration, and how to plan for such systems. Several interesting robot designs have been proposed [RV01, KR99, MKY98, TMK99, FK90, PCSC96, YDR00, SWC99, UK00]. For each of these systems, architecture-dependent algorithms that couple planning to the specific a...

Increased robotic capability and usage is envisaged for future planetary missions. More industrial activity will be required in precursor robotic missions where improved autonomy and redundancy to failure is necessary for extremely remote reliable operation. A Modular Robotic (MR) design could prove beneficial in addressing these applications as well as terrestrial scenarios where remote or haz...

Dynamic product reconfiguration involves making changes to a deployed product configuration at runtime. Examples include dynamically adding, deleting, or modifying product features and making dynamic changes to architectural structures. Researchers have studied dynamic product reconfiguration for various application areas, including self-healing systems,2 context-aware computing,3 software comp...

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications comprise a large number of intelligent devices sharing information and making cooperative decisions without any human intervention. To support M2M requirements and applications which are in perpetual evolution, many standards are designed, updated and rendered obsolete. Among these, arises from The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) a ...

In this paper we describe several prototypes of self-replicating robotic systems that have been developed at JHU. In contrast to self-reconfiguration, selfreplication is the process of assembling a functional robot from passive components. The robot that is assembled (the replica) is an exact copy of the robot doing the assembling. Our presentation marks the beginning of the JHU effort in this ...

Stream processing is a well-suited model for parallel programming, as it allows the programmer to design parallel algorithms intuitively by arranging computational tasks into a data-flow graph and consecutively constructing a streaming network from it. However, a network that was designed with a specific workload in mind will not work optimally if anticipated parameters, as for example data rat...

In this paper we present role-based control which is a general bottom-up approach to the control of locomotion in self-reconfigurable robots. We use role-based control to implement a caterpillar, a sidewinder, and a rolling track gait in the CONRO self-reconfigurable robot consisting of eight modules. Based on our experiments and discussion we conclude that control systems based on role-based c...