The distributed control and experiments of directional self-assembly for modular swarm robots

Self-assembly is a process during which pre-existing components are autonomously organized into some special patterns or structures without human intervention. In this paper, we propose a new control algorithm on distributed self-assembly which is implemented on the Sambot robot platform. A directional self-assembly control model is proposed, in which a configuration connection state table is used to represent the configuration of the robotic structures composed of multiple Sambots. There are three types of Sambots, docking Sambots, SEED Sambot and Connected Sambots. All docking Sambots adopt behavior-based controller that is independent of target configuration. The SEED Sambot and Connected Sambots are used to implement configuration growth. Self-assembly experiments of snake-like and quadruped configurations are conducted on the Sambot platform with five Sambots. The experimental results show the effectiveness and scalability of the distributed self-assembly algorithm.