The Cooperation of Swarm-bots: Physical Interactions in Collective Robotics

The SWARM-BOTS project is organized to develop a simulation platform to support the evaluation of different hardware components, to help the design and the validation of distributed swarm control policies, and to reproduce kinematics and dynamic robot 3-D behaviors on terrains with different levels of roughness. The result is Swarmbot3D, a platform that implements a modular description of the s-bot, based on basic modules such as treels system module, the rotating turret module, the front-arm gripper module, and the flexible side-arm gripper module. Overall, the project achieved very interesting results concerning the implementation and the validation of the mechatronic concept of self-assembling systems, the design of control algorithms, and the exploration of the potential impact of the approach.