SWARMORPH: Multirobot Morphogenesis Using Directional Self-Assembly

In this paper, we propose SWARMORPH: a distributed morphology generation mechanism for autonomous self-assembling mobile robots. Self-organized growth of global morphological structures emerges through the repeated application of local morphology extension rules. We present details of the directiona...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: O'Grady, Rehan (author)
Other Authors: Christensen, Anders Lyhne (author), Dorigo, Marco (author)
Format: article
Language:eng
Published: 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10071/5440
Country:Portugal
Oai:oai:repositorio.iscte-iul.pt:10071/5440
Description
Summary:In this paper, we propose SWARMORPH: a distributed morphology generation mechanism for autonomous self-assembling mobile robots. Self-organized growth of global morphological structures emerges through the repeated application of local morphology extension rules. We present details of the directional self-assembly mechanism that provides control over the orientation of interrobot connections. We conduct real-world experiments to validate the low-level directional self-assembly mechanism and the growth of global morphologies. We demonstrate the scalability of the approach with large numbers of robots in simulation-based experiments.