Swarms of modular, self-reconfigurable robots have a lot going for them, at least in theory— they’re resilient and easy to scale, since big robots can be made on demand from lots of little robots. One of the trickiest bits about modular robots is figuring out a simple and reliable way of getting them to connect to each other, without having to rely on some kind of dedicated connectivity system.
This week at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots (IROS), a research team at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, led by Tin Lun Lam is presenting a new kind of modular robot that solves this problem by using little robotic vehicles inside of iron spheres that can stick together wherever you need them to.
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