Morphology based Locomotion Controller for Modular Robots

Stigmergy is defined as a mechanism of coordination through indirect communication among agents, which can be commonly observed in social insects such as ants. In this work, emergence of coordination for locomotion in modular robots, through indirect communication among modules is being investigated. Due to the embodiment of the robot in the physical world, forces between physically connected modules in a modular robotic configuration exist as a result of interaction between modules, as well as between modules and their environment. These forces can be seen as analog communication between modules, and used as information for self-organization in a modular robotic organism. Also, experiments proving a strong interdependence between the morphology of the robotic organism and the emerged global behavior, have been conducted in this work.

A. Ranganath, J. Gonzalez-Gomez and L. Moren, “Morphology Dependent Distributed Controller for Locomotion in Modular Robots”, in Post-Graduate Conference on Robotics and Development of Cognition, Lausanne, Switzerland, Sep 2012. [PDF]

A. Ranganath, “Morphology based Locomotion Controller for Modular Robots”. Masters thesis, Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, University Carlos III of Madrid. June, 2013 [PDF]