A new meta-module for controlling large sheets of ATRON modules

Abstract

In this paper we present a 2D meta-module for the ATRON robot, which simplifies the motion constraints significantly. The motion capabilities of the new meta-module is similar to that of previous sliding cube style modules with the addition of one extra action, which is shown to improve the motion capabilities of the modules greatly. In general our work shows that if three simple actions, which is implemented by our proposed meta-module, is implemented by a self-reconfigurable robot module or meta-module then the control of the robot will be simple. The improved motion capabilities allow us to use offline planning for large groups consisting of hundreds of meta- modules. The simple motion constraints of the meta-module further allows us to implement a distributed cluster flow locomotion gait, with the interesting property that the group of meta-modules self-organizes into a shape that makes the locomotion efficient.