Self-assembly and locomotion of diverse structures for swarm robots on adaption application

Swarm robots can assemble different structures to adapt to the changing environmnts. This video shows the newly proposed Sambot form different robotic structures to climp the obscales to finish a phototaxis task in two ways, inculduing simulation and hardware experiments. According to a general control framework for the swarm robots with self-assembly in real environments proposed by us, there are three tasks: exploration task, self-assembly task and locomotion task. The module robot explores the range of the working space through sensors including infrared detector, and decide what structure is needed. Then, through self-assembly some modules dock with each other and form a complex configuration. This configuration can make the robots locomote and finish the given task. In the video, the adaption through self-assembly to the environment is dementrated, including assembling into a snake-like configuration to creep over the low boundary and a cross quadruped one to climb over the higher boundary. © 2011 IEEE