A novel self-assembly modular swarm robot: Docking mechanism design and self-assembly control

Based on the Sambot (self-assembly modular swarm robot), the autonomous docking and self-assembly among multiple robots are studied and realized. First of all, a novel docking mechanism composed of a pair of active docking hooks and four docking grooves is proposed, which can dock a Sambot with other Sambots from four directions (front, back, left and right) within a certain range of misalignment. Second, the behavior based control method is adopted, and the self-assembly behaviors of the docking Sambot are accomplished by means of limited perception and local communication of its own infrared sensors, including the Search_goal, Navigation, Autonomous Docking behaviors. Finally, the experiments of autonomous docking and self-assembly are conducted with two Sambots. The experimental results show that the self-assembly control algorithms can be applied directly to the case of multiple Sambots to form an ensemble robot with arbitrary configurations.