Self-Reconfigurable robots are complex distributed systems composed of multiple modular robotic units. These units can rearrange to form different structures that fit the specific tasks that face the robot. The unique and complex nature of self-reconfigurable robots has lead to a challenging subset of motion-planning problems. In this paper several types of reconfigurable robots are described a...

Configuration space computation is a transformation process that reduces a robot to a single reference point by expanding obstacles on the image plane. The obstacles can be expanded by inverting the robot along a reference point and then slide this reference point along their borders. The area covered by the union of inverted robot during the sliding along with the obstacles defines the configu...

In this paper we examine the development of modular self-reconfigurable robots. A survey of existing modular robots is given. Some limitations of homogeneous designs and connection mechanisms are discussed. Therefore, we propose a heterogeneous self-reconfigurable robot with genderless, fail-safe connecting mechanisms. We initially design three basic types (joint, power and special units) of mo...

Existing self-reconfigurable robots achieve connections and disconnections by a separate drive of the docking system. In this paper, we present a new docking system with which the connections and disconnections are driven by locomotion actuators, without the need for a separate drive, which reduces the weight and the complexity of the modules. This self-reconfigurable robot consists of two type...

The majority of existing approaches to mobile robot localization assume that the world is static, which clearly does not hold in most real-world application domains. In this paper we present a probabilistic approach to global localization in reconfigurable environments, where the robot pose and the environment state are jointly estimated using a RaoBlackwellized particle filter. The environment...