Self-Reconfigurable Modular Robots – Hardware and Software Development in AIST –

In this paper we present the development of hardware and software of self-reconfigurable modular robots in Na-tional Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Tech-nology (AIST), Japan. Thanks to their flexibility, versatil-ity and fault-tolerance, self-reconfigurable modular robots are expected to be used in various application fields, such as space, rescue or micro-sized world. Our research group has been pioneering this new field and developed several hardware prototypes and corresponding software that ex-ploit the robots ’ potential. We have been successfully demonstrated the feasibility of the self-reconfigurable mod-ular robots based on experiments from different aspects. Starting from two-dimensional (2D) self-assembling and self-repairing machine Fractum, we review hardware de-velopment in diverse directions, like to micro-world, three-dimensional (3D) structures and motions; as well as the progress of control software, including distributed control and recent evolutionary motion acquisition.