Evolve-Ability of the Robot Platform in the Symbrion Project

Abstract

In a swarm of robots the individual entities can profit from cooperation, emerge new behaviors and can increase the overall fitness. In a more advanced approach, robots work not only collectively, but can also aggregate into multi-robot organisms and can share energy, resources and functionality. This approach provides many advantages for robotic systems: the aggregated organism, considered as one robot, possesses an extended reliability, adaptivity and evolve-ability. In this paper we present the vision and the ongoing work in the large integrated European project "SYMBRION", dealing with self-assembling of swarm robots. We point out different challenges in the field of hardware and software as well as describe main principles of evolve-ability applied to the platform.