Daniela Rus and other Dartmouth Robotics Lab researchers have developed control methods that guarantee self-reconfigurable robots won’t fall apart as they change shape or move across a surface.

Self-reconfigurable robots can reshape themselves as their task or environment changes, ideally without human intervention. A walking robot used for search-and-rescue operations would transform into a snake-like form to slither through small spaces in a collapsed building (see Tiny robots to the rescue.) A rolling robot exploring the surface of Mars would flow like water over a vertical drop or “flow” uphill onto a rock ledge.

Rus’s 3-D shape-shifting robots are built out of “expanding cubes,” such as the Crystal modules.

Each Crystal module has sides that extend and contract and that use a ’key-in-lock’ mechanism to attach to neighboring atoms. The “lattice robots” can assume a wide variety of 3-D shapes, an advantage over robots whose modules can only form long, thin chains.

What is more tricky is to control how the pieces reassembled themselves: researchers are adopting distributed approaches, in which each robotic module takes at least some control of its own destiny.

“Since we are talking about potentially very large systems, with thousands of individual parts, it’s important to consider distributed control and planning,” Rus said. “And parallel and distributed algorithms are hard to guarantee.”

From Innovations Report, via Robotics.