From real robot swarm to evolutionary multi-robot organism

Collective working allows microrobots to achieve more functionality, better performance and higher reliability on the macroscopic level. In this paper we demonstrate the on-going work in developing novel collective systems, where swarm robots work not only collectively, but are also capable of autonomous aggregation and disaggregation into a higher multi- robot organism. The main issues of such an organism, as well as its genome-based control, are discussed. We show the developed docking approach and investigate topological transformations in a prototype of self-assembling robots.