In it the reporter, Ortis Deley, travels to the US and visits both Carnegie Mellon and University of Pennsylvania.

First he visits Carnegie Mellon to see the latest progress in the research on robotic snakes, and [...]]]> The Gadget Show is a UK TV show for fun and interesting technical gadgets and in their latest episode they feature Modular Robots.

In it the reporter, Ortis Deley, travels to the US and visits both Carnegie Mellon and University of Pennsylvania.

First he visits Carnegie Mellon to see the latest progress in the research on robotic snakes, and gets closer then he might like when the robots actually climbs his leg. I find the different gates for snake robots very interesting and I posted about them a while ago, Link.

Then he goes on to visit University of Pennsylvania and their Modular Robotics Lab to see their research on Self Re-configuring Modular Robots, which is what my blog focuses on. To illustrate the really interesting possibility to self repair that Self Re-configuring Modular Robots have, he actually gets to brake the units apart by kicking them and see them reassemble them self back to the original configuration on their own.

I think that it is great to see modular robotics presented in this way, where the reporter goes to the leading researchers and gets first hand information.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuPV2_IxHMU

This paper was an interesting read. I think it shows how far the research on SRCMR has come, that we can now start to refine the design.

I [...]]]> Paper, FE No;1:Reusable Electronics and Adaptable Communication
as Implemented in the Odin Modular Robot
By Ricardo Franco Mendoza Garcia, Andreas Lyder, David Johan Christensen and Kasper Stoy

This paper was an interesting read. I think it shows how far the research on SRCMR has come, that we can now start to refine the design.

I think that it is interesting to see that the same concepts that make SRCRMR interesting in the general sense, works in the design of the units themselves as well. It is really interesting how division of general and specific systems and components can keep the flexibility of the development platform and significantly speed up development. It also shows that on one level a real world SRCMR system must be a hybrid between homogeneous and heterogeneous.

There is also a video of the proof-of-concept experiment but I blogged separately about that.

I certainly would not miss the presentation of this paper at ICRA2009

One is that they have made the modules more robust, communication more fault tolerant, and the gripping mechanism more reliable. This is naturally very important, reliable and fault tolerant units and systems are absolutely necessary for SRCMR.

The other [...]]]> Ulrik Pagh Schultz, Mirko Bordignon, Kasper Støy have made another interesting video, showing some new developments.

One is that they have made the modules more robust, communication more fault tolerant, and the gripping mechanism more reliable. This is naturally very important, reliable and fault tolerant units and systems are absolutely necessary for SRCMR.

The other thing that I find significant in the video, is the  addition to the software development environment that allows you to reverse any self-reconfiguration process. I think that there are many significant software concepts that are going to be discovered in SRCMR.  This is because although the hardware development is very exciting and very visual, it would not be totally inappropriate to describe SRCMR as a software revolution. As a incredibly large part of SRCMR solution is going to be software.