Self-reconfiguration by a modular robot that has a cell-differentiation ability

One of the most graceful phenomena widely observed in nature is self-reconfiguration; living systems spontaneously reconfigure their body structure through the developmental process. While this remarkable phenomenon still remains much to be understood in biology, the concept of self-reconfiguration 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-reconfiguration with the use of a modular robot. The main contributions of this paper are twofold: the first concerns the exploitation of emergent phenomena stemming from the carefully designed interaction between the control and mechanical systems; the second is related to the implementation of different inter-modular adhesiveness derived from an artificial cell-differentiation. Here, form generation by self-reconfiguration is considered as the result of time evolution toward the most dynamically stable state. Preliminary simulation results show that stable self-reconfiguration is achieved irrespective of the initial positional relationship among the modules.