Abstract: Inspired by the swarm behaviors of the social insects, the self-assembly provides an effective behavioral paradigm for collaboration of the swarm robots. Based on the Sambot platform, a distributed self-assembly control algorithm for a given robotic structures is presented. A configuration connection state table is used to represent the configuration of the robotic structures formed by multiple Sambots. A distributed self-assembly control model is proposed. There are three types of Sambots, i.e. SEED, connecting and docking Sambots. The SEED and connecting Sambots are used to decide the self-assembly rules and control the growth of the configuration. Docking Sambots, without any target configuration and global coordinate information, adopt behavior-based controller to realize autonomous docking with SEED and connecting Sambots. Five Sambots are used to successfully demonstrate the self-assembly experiments of snakelike and quadruped configurations, which verifies the effectiveness of the control algorithm.

Key words: Distributed control, Modular robot, Self-assembly, Swarm robotics