Issues in Self-Repairing Robotic Self-Assembly

Robot swarms provide interesting and potentially very useful examples of self-organizing systems. This chapter focuses on a specific approach, dubbed “active self-assembly”, for constructing arbitrary shapeswith swarms of identical and identically programmed robots. Important, open issues are identified in the specific context of active self-assembly, but they are of more general applicability. Much of the discussion is centered on the fundamental problems of how to control a swarm to ensure that the structures it builds are self-repairing, and of how to assess the performance of self-assembling swarms.