Biorobotics Laboratory BioRob

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Self-Organisation of Locomotion

in Modular Robots

Introduction

Modular robotics is a kind of antithesis to classic robotics. Instead of building one complex monolithic robot, we build many simple ones. Of course those simple units alone are far from being able to cope with even the most simple task achieved by a monolithic robot. However by giving them the capabilities of interacting with each other, we hope they will be able to achieve complex tasks with a high degree of robustness and adaptation.

The aim of this project is to study self-organisation capabilities in modular robotics and more particularly, how good locomotion behaviours may arise from the collaboration of a group of homogeneous and randomly connected modules.

Documents

Report [ .ps.gz ] [ .pdf ] Errata : Coming soon...
Slides [ .pdf ]

Videos

Brownian motion & docking : 1

Walking robots : 1 2 3 4 5
Rolling robot : 1
Instable robot : 1

Rolling robots : 1 2

Links

Existing Projects

XEROX Polybot
CONRO
Molecule & Crystal
MTran
Hydra

Reading List

Overview of Existing Modular Robotics Projects
IEEE Spectrum's Article on Modular Robotics

Source Code & Library Patches

This section will hopefully soon contain the entire source code developed during the project as well as patches that correct a small bug found in GAlib and add a useful functionality to ODE Drawstuff library.