An autonomous robot that duplicates itself from low-complexity components

Abstract

This paper presents an autonomous self-replicating robot consisting of four low-complexity modules. The entire system is composed of a parent robot, four unassembled modules provided as resources, and an environment where the self-replication takes place. The parent robot grows itself by attaching the resource modules onto itself until it doubles its physical size, and then splits in the middle thereby returning the parent to its original state and producing a daughter robot. We call these processes expansion and separation, respectively. The environment plays a passive role as a catalyst that helps generating a spiral trajectory for the parent robot and does not hold any information about the resource modules. To assess the physical changes made by self-replication, structural and informational complexities associated with the robotic system and the self-replication process are quantified and compared to previous prototypes.