We present distributed morphogenesis control strategies in a swarm of robots able to autonomously assemble into 3D symbiotic organisms to perform specific tasks. Each robot in such a system can work autonomously, while teams of robots can self-assemble into various morphologies when required. The idea is to combine the advantages of swarm and self-reconfigurable robotic systems in order to inve...

Traversing challenging structures like boulders, rubble, stairs and steps, mobile robots need a special level of mobility. Robots with reconfigurable chassis are able to alter their configuration to overcome such structures. This paper presents a two-stage motion planning scheme for reconfigurable robots in rough terrain. First, we consider the robot’s operating limits rather than the complete ...

Current trends such as shorter product lifecycles, reduced time-to-market and mass-customization require new paradigms and approaches for production lines and machines. In the long term, production and manufacturing companies will only be able to survive in the face of increasing globalisation if they can react flexibly and quickly to changing customer and market demands. New paradigms and appr...

The reversible process between distributed robots and connected robot is the key issue of mobile self-reconfigurable robots, which can be divided into two phases of aggregation and docking. In this paper, corresponding strategies are proposed for robots enhanced with mobility. In the dynamic aggregation mechanisms, the optimal locations are determined based on the multi-object optimization of t...

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...