A Memoryless Robot that Assembles Seven Subsystems to Copy Itself

Abstract

This paper presents a robot that can assemble exact functional replicas of itself from seven more basic parts/subsystems. The robot follows lines on the floor using light sensors and a simple control circuit without any onboard memory. It performs a self-replication task comparable in difficulty to those of previous self-replicating robots, but with a greatly simplified control system and reduced overall system complexity. Three methods are presented that quantify aspects of the complexity of the robot and the pattern of lines it follows. The complexity measures provide a way to compare existing self-replicating robot systems and to evaluate new designs. Robotic self-replication is an aspect of automated assembly that has not been studied extensively in hardware, and this work (which was the outcome of a project in a mechatronics course at JHU) is one step in a larger effort to quantify and demonstrate various aspects of this research area.