My Self Reconfiguring Modular Robots search

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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.

When reading it, I had a thrilling moment when I found my own blog listed! That was so cool [...]]]> Self-Reconfigurable Robots by Sam Slee is an incredible resource. It contains an incredible number of links to what must be every major paper, research institution and researcher in the field of SRCMR. It is simply amazing.

When reading it, I had a thrilling moment when I found my own blog listed! That was so cool since I started it in Sep-08 and have not written very much yet. If he is that updated, he will certainly know about everything!

Before publishing this post I wrote to him and now the entry is updated! Now he knows who I am:-)

I think the two repositories I know of , Sam Slee, and Neil Desmond, really cover everything you need to know about this area.

I hope to complement these excellent repositories with a combination of short news items and tidbits I find when I explore SRCMR  and editorial content in essay form, my own and others. I will  focus the news items  relevant to the area, like new papers, videos, conferences of interest and the people attending. So if You have any news, or writing you would like to share, just use my name  per and the domain of the blog and I will be happy to work with you.

It really shows how incredibly capable and different SRCMR solutions are going to be.

The video beautifully illustrates that solutions developed with SRCMR will be able to do many things, that old school products would struggle [...]]]> This is a interesting video by Howie Choset that shows a number of different gaits of modular snake robots.

It really shows how incredibly capable and different SRCMR solutions are going to be.

The video beautifully illustrates that solutions developed with SRCMR will be able to do many things, that old school products would struggle to do, even if they were specifically designed and developed to do only one of them.

This is a snake solution, but I am certain you could do much the same thing with waves in surfaces that could transport any type payload in any terrain.

Also, the gaits shown in this video are only the ones that are possible within the continuous, non-self-reconfiguring snake-style solution. A self-reconfiguring solution could transform itself into many more gaits.

The possibilities of SRCMR will not be limited to different gaits and moving around in totally new ways. It will also provide novel solutions to many other groups of problems. Each one giving just as many new possibilities as getting what we need, where we need it in a totally new way does.

If you are interested in more videos and information you can view it here

If you are interested in learning more about the topic you can read this

It even works in thin air! This short snake turns in the air like a cat.

It will be interesting [...]]]> I found this, in internet terms rather old video, but I think it is a really cool illustration of how things can work in the future. I especially like the part (starting at 35 seconds) where he creates a phone when he needs one just by doing the dialing motion!

It will be interesting to see, how the fact that the user interface can be controlled by the software and the user can control the software, by physically changing the user interface, can be used to create more powerful applications that are easier to use.

It is easy to see that it will be possible to make totally new user interfaces. But it will also be possible to really improve the well known and widely used ones, by making them very configurable and adaptable. For instance it would be possible to change the size of  a normal keyboard to fit the size of your hand, add and remove keys or their captions.

And if you consider how much we already interact with computers, this will be a huge market.

However, the resolution needed requires a unit size that is more than likely quite a bit in the future.

You can find the original article and the home page of the designer Chris Woebken here.

One thing I noted on this projects page, is the same frustration with words that I frequently have when writing this blog. It is hard to know what to call these things. I call their creation a solution (to the problem of user interface hardware). And although nanotechnology will certainly play a huge role when we are approaching this unit size, what Woebken is doing is, in my opinion, SRCMR not nanotechnology. However using SRCMR as a name for this area is not optimal either, and we eventually need to agree upon a more suitable name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Reconfiguring_Modular_Robotics