Self-assembly in Heterogeneous Modular Robots

This paper describes the distributed self-assembly of a multi-robot 'organism' from a swarm of autonomous heterogeneous modular mobile robots. A distributed self-assembly strategy based on a symbol sequence representation is proposed. Constructed from a tree representation of an organism, the symbol sequence is presented as a well organised nested structure in a compact format. It includes not only information on the topology of the organism but also how the organism will be self-assembled. The proposed approach has been tested with real robot prototypes. Results show that robots can successfully self-assemble to required target body plans within certain time frames.