Development of a genderless and fail-safe connection system for autonomous modular robots

One of the most challenging tasks on developing hardware of modular robots is to design a reliable and flexible connection system. This paper presents the design and implementation of a GENderless and FAil-safe (GENFA) connection system for autonomous modular robots that possesses self-assembly, self-reconfiguration and self-healing capabilities. By using the GENFA connector, a group of autonomous modular robots can assemble into a single robotic organism. With robust mechanical and electrical connection, a single robotic organism can disassemble into a set of disconnected units. In this paper, the detailed design of a connection system is presented. Then, mechanical strength and misalignment tolerance are studied theoretically. Some experimental tests are conducted with miniature mobile robots, and some experimental results show that the GENFA connection system is power efficient, fail-safe, and has limited misalignment tolerance.