Autonomous Self-Assembly in Swarm-Bots

In this paper, we discuss the self-assembling capabilities of the swarm-bot, a distributed robotics concept that lies at the intersection between collective and self-reconfigurable robotics. A swarm-bot is comprised of autonomous mobile robots called s-bots. S-bots can either act independently or self-assemble into a swarm-bot by using their grippers. We report on experiments in which we study the process that leads a group of s-bots to self-assemble. In particular, we present results of experiments in which we vary the number of s-bots (up to 16 physical robots), their starting configurations, and the properties of the terrain on which self-assembly takes place. In view of the very successful experimental results, swarm-bot qualifies as the current state of the art in autonomous self-assembly