SWARM-BOT: A New Concept of Robust All-Terrain Mobile Robotic System
Mondada Francesco, Guignard André , Colot Alexandre, Floreano Dario, Deneubourg Jean-Louis, Gambardella Luca Maria, Nolfi Stefano, Dorigo Marco

Abstract:

This paper presents a new robotic concept, called SWARM-BOT, based on a swarm of autonomous mobile robots with self-assembling capabilities. This concept has been developed to ensure robust navigation, search and transportation in rough terrain. The SWARM-BOT concept takes advantage from collective and distributed approaches to ensure robustness to failures and to hard environment conditions. SWARM-BOT is provided with self-assembling and self-reconfiguring capabilities: each robot is able to connect and disconnect to another one building large flexible structures. This type of structure is designed to face all-terrain conditions in a very efficient way. This paper introduces the SWARM-BOT concept from a mechatronic prospective.