Self-Assembly Through the Interplay between Control and Mechanical Systems

• Main Authors: Ishiguro, Akio, Maegawa, Tomoki
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Communication system control; Control systems; emergence; Emergent phenomena; Evolution (biology); Force control; fully decentralized control; Intelligent robots; Mechanical systems; modular robot; Self-assembly; self-repair; Size control; Systems biology
• ISSN: 2153-0858; 2153-0866
• DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2006.282546

One of the most graceful phenomena widely observed in nature is self-assembly; living systems spontaneously form their body structure through the developmental process. While this remarkable phenomenon still leaves much to be understood in biology, the concept of self-assembly becomes undeniably indispensable also in artificial systems as they increase in size and complexity. Based on this consideration, this paper discusses the realization of self-assembly with the use of a modular robot. The main contributions of this paper are two-fold: the first concerns the exploitation of emergent phenomena stemming from the interplay between the control and mechanical systems; the second is related to the implementation of the different adhesiveness among the modules. Here, form generation by self-assembly is considered as the result of time evolution toward the most dynamically stable state. Owing to this, the proposed method also satisfies significant ability of self-repair without making any modification to the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that stable and spontaneous self-assembly is achieved irrespective of the initial positional relationship among the modules