3D Coating Self-Assembly for Modular Robotic Scaffolds

Abstract

This paper addresses the self-reconfiguration problem in large-scale modular robots for the purpose of shape formation for object representation. It aims to show that this process can be accelerated without compromising on the visual aspect of the final object, by creating an internal skeleton of the shape using the previously introduced sandboxing and scaffolding techniques, and then coating this skeleton with a layer of modules for higher visual fidelity. We discuss the challenges of the coating problem, introduce a basic method for constructing the coating of a scaffold layer by layer, and show that even with a straightforward algorithm, our scaffolding and coating combo uses much fewer modules than dense shapes and offers attractive reconfiguration times. Finally, we show that it could be a strong alternative to the construction of dense shapes using traditional self-reconfiguration algorithms.