Configuration Control for Physical Coupling of Heterogeneous Robot Swarms
This addresses the challenge of adaptive and energy-efficient swarm robotics for applications like search and rescue or construction, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing swarm coupling concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling heterogeneous robot swarms to physically couple and decouple for forming functional structures and performing individual tasks, demonstrating experiments with up to nine robots successfully executing coupling, gap-crossing, and decoupling behaviors.
In this paper, we present a heterogeneous robot swarm system that can physically couple with each other to form functional structures and dynamically decouple to perform individual tasks. The connection between robots can be formed with a passive coupling mechanism, ensuring minimum energy consumption during coupling and decoupling behavior. The heterogeneity of the system enables the robots to perform structural enhancement configurations based on specific environmental requirements. We propose a connection-pair oriented configuration control algorithm to form different assemblies. We show experiments of up to nine robots performing the coupling, gap-crossing, and decoupling behaviors.