Swarm-bot: A Novel Type of Self-Assembling Robot

Swarm robotics [3] is a relatively new and rapidly growing field in collective robotics. It involves the study of robotic systems made up of cooperating robots. I have been invited here to report on work we carried out in the SWARM-BOTS project, a project funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Commission. This work is directly inspired by the collective behavior of social insect colonies and other animal societies [1, 2]. In particular, it focuses on the study of the mechanisms which govern the processes of self-organisation and self-assembly in artificial autonomous agents. In order to pursue these objectives, we developed a new type of robot, called an s-bot (see Fig. l , left). The s-bots are mobile robots with the ability to connect to and to disconnect from each other. A swarm-bot is defined as an artifact composed of many assembled s-bots (see Fig . l , right).