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.