Design of Scout Robot as a robotic module for symbiotic multi-robot organisms

Self-reconfigurable modular robots have been studied worldwide mainly for autonomous exploration in unstructured environments. In previous studies, robotic modules were designed to be functional only as a part of an assembled structure, and thus the exploration capability was limited. Symbiotic multi-robot organisms have been newly proposed to design robotic modules as large-scale swarms of robots that can physically dock with each other and symbiotically share energy and computational resources within a single “artificial-life-form”. In this paper, a novel robotic module named Scout Robot, which is one of the three robotic platforms designed for the multi-robot organisms, is presented. The Scout robot is an autonomous miniature robot and equipped with many onboard sensors and a locomotion capability. It can move autonomously on rough terrains to explore the surroundings and interact with the other robots. The Scout robot is also equipped with 2 DoFs of actuation and shares the same docking design with the other robotic platforms, and thus can be a part of an assembled organism. In the experiments, the image-guided locomotion of a Scout robot and the multimodal locomotion of assembled robots were demonstrated.