This work was part of the European Commission funded project Symbrion. The main goal of this project was to develop robots capable of operating as a large swarm or assembling into larger organisms to investigate novel principles of evolution and adaptation. The objective was to develop a distributed controller using local communication between connected modules in a modular robot to achieve locomotion and obstacle avoidance. Inspired by biological hormones, modules produced and diffused information (Digital Hormones) about their connections and sensor stimuli to neighbors. This allowed modules to determine their topological location and choose appropriate local actions, leading to emergent global behavior. The controller was successfully evaluated on Caterpillar, 'V', and Scorpion configurations.

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Highlights Video

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