Self-sssembly and morphology control in a swarm-bot

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed control mechanism for a self-propelled self-assembling robotic system that allows robots to form specific, connected morphologies. Global morphologies are 'grown' using local visual perception only. The robots in the system do not have access to a blueprint of the global pattern and the algorithmic rules are solely based on what a single robot can see in its immediate surroundings. None of the robots have any predefined position in the final morphology, except for the seed robot that initiates the self-assembly process. Robots that are part of the connected entity indicate where new robots should attach in order to grow the local structure appropriately. The paper demonstrates the efficacy of the mechanism by letting groups of up to 9 real robots self-assemble into four different morphologies: line, star, arrow, and dense.