In this paper we described the hardware architecture of an inexpensive, heterogeneous, mobile robot swarm, designed and developed at RISC lab, University of Bridgeport. Each UB robot swarm is equipped with sensors, actuators, control and communication units, power supply, and interconnection mechanism. This article also describes the essential features and design of a dynamic power distribution...

As research progresses in distributed robotic systems, more and more aspects of multi-robot systems are being explored. This special issue on Multi-Robot Systems provides a broad sampling of the research that is currently ongoing in the field of distributed mobile robot systems. To help categorize this research, we have identified seven primary research topics within multi-robot systems — biolo...

Autonomous operation of robotic systems in un-known environments is currently one of the most significant fields of study in mobile robotics, with numerous research groups worldwide determined on solving its various associated challenges. This paper describes the principal features of Mecabot, a modular robotic system capable of modifying its physical configuration according to the type of terr...

A key challenge in self-reconfigurable robotics is the development and validation of complex distributed behaviors and control algorithms, particularly for large populations of modules. Physics-based, 3D simulators play a vital role in helping researchers overcome this challenge by allowing them to approximate the physical interactions of connected, autonomous robotic systems with one another a...

This paper presents a biologically inspired approach to two basic problems in modular self-reconfigurable robots: adaptive communication in self-reconfigurable and dynamic networks, and distributed collaboration between the physically coupled modules to accomplish global effects such as locomotion and reconfiguration. Inspired by the biological concept of hormone, the paper develops the adaptiv...

Self-reconfigurable modular robots have an intriguingly flexible design, composing a single robot with many small modules that can autonomously move to transform the robot’s shape and structure. Each module may only have limited processing and memory resources. This makes scaling to a large number of modules quite challenging. This paper introduces a novel distributed locomotion algorithm for l...

This paper presents an implementation of an architectural module that corresponds to a long serial chain modular robot. As such, this configuration poses possibilities that can move using travelling wave gaits based on snakes and caterpillars. The gaits are controlled with a Gait Control Table which is a simple but powerful way to coordinate the motion of a multiple degree-of-freedom systems. T...

In the present paper a software environment for the study and verification of robot control solutions is described. Such a tool is based on closed loop modelling and simulation in the integrated ADAMS-Simulink environment. The proposed method is applied to the study and optimization of the control of a prototypical system, constituted by a reconfigurable robot with parallel architecture and by ...

We demonstrate how multiagent systems provide useful control techniques for modular self-reconfigurable (metamorphic) robots. Such robots consist of many modules that can move relative to each other, thereby changing the overall shape of the robot to suit different tasks. Multiagent control is particularly wellsuited for tasks involving uncertain and changing environments. We illustrate this ap...

Applications executed on embedded systems require dynamicity and flexibility according to user and environment needs. Dynamically reconfigurable architecture could satisfy these requirements but needs efficient mechanisms to be managed efficiently. In this paper, we propose a dedicated application modeling technique that helps to establish a predictive scheduling approach to manage a dynamicall...