SWARM-BOT: from concept to implementation

This paper presents a new robotic concept, called SWARM-BOT, based on a swarm of autonomous mobile robots with self-assembling capabilities. SWARM-BOT takes advantage from collective and distributed approaches to ensure robustness to failures and to hard environment conditions in tasks such as navigation, search and transportation in rough terrain. One SWARM-BOT is composed of a number of simpler robots, called s-bots, physically interconnected. The SWARM-BOT is provided with self-assembling and self-reconfiguring capabilities whereby s-bots can connect and disconnect forming large flexible structures. This paper introduces the SWARM-BOT concept and describes its implementation from a mechatronic perspective.