Toward magnetically-coupled reconfigurable modular robots

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a robotic module that is the building block for a magnetically-coupled reconfigurable robot network. The developed module has on-board computation, IR communication and integrated power. The development of this modular network and the associated reconfiguration methodology is motivated by the premise that magnetic latching is much more plausible than physical latching as scale decreases to the micro and nano levels.