Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Mobile robots are said to be capable of self-assembly when they can autonomously form physical connections with each other. Despite the recent proliferation of self-assembling systems, little work has been done on using self-assembly to add functional value to a robotic system, and even less on quantifying the contribution of self-assembly to system performance. In this study we demonstrate and quantify the performance benefits of i) acting as a physically larger self-assembled entity, ii) using self-assembly adaptively and iii) making the robots morphologically aware (the self-assembled robots leverage their new connected morphology in a task specific way). In our experiments, two real robots must navigate to a target over a-priori unknown terrain. In some cases the terrain can only be overcome by a self-assembled connected entity. In other cases, the robots can reach the target faster by navigating individually.
Dario Floreano, Nicola Nosengo
Francesco Mondada, Michael Bonani, Roderich Gross