Self-Assembling Robots

One of the grand challenges of robotics is the design of robots that are adaptive and self-sufficient. This can be crucial for robots exposed to environments that are unstructured (in space and time) or not easily accessible for a human operator, such as the inside of a blood vessel, a collapsed building, the deep sea, or the surface of another planet.Modular reconfigurable robots are among the most flexible robots that exist. They are made of one or a few types of component modules which can be connected into many distinct topologies. Therefore, exploring a limited set of modules, it is possible to set up a robot with context-dependent morphology. An interesting category of modular robots are selfreconfigurable robots, which can autonomously transform between different morphologies [8]. For instance, a selfreconfigurable robot could adapt its locomotion strategy by transforming from a snake morphology (which could offer advantages when navigating through narrow passages) to a hexapod morphology (which could offer advantages when navigating uneven terrain) and vice versa. In many of the current implementations, self-reconfigurable robots are initially manually assembled and once assembled, they are incapable of assimilating additional component modules without external assistance. In our view, this lack of autonomy is a severe limitation to the adaptivity and self-sufficiency of these robotic systems. In contrast, this thesis focuses on reconfigurable robotic systems whose components are capable of self-assembling autonomously. Thereby, the components can in principle set up modular robots of arbitrary size, composition, and function.