Coordinating collective locomotion in an amorphous modular robot

13 years 2 months ago

Download www.eecs.harvard.edu

— Modular robots can potentially assemble into a wide range of conﬁgurations to locomote in different environments. However, designing locomotion strategies for each conﬁguration is often tedious and has generally relied on a priori known connection geometry. Here we present a framework for 2D modular robots made of square modules assembled with arbitrary geometry, which achieve collective and directed locomotion with no centralized controller. Individual modules communicate locally and provably achieve consensus in coordinating movement in a common travel direction. In experiments with simulations and hardware prototypes, we show that robots achieve effective locomotion, irrespective of the number of modules and their connectivity which can be highly asymmetric.

Chih-Han Yu, Justin Werfel, Radhika Nagpal

Real-time Traffic