Modular Robots

levin writes "An article in the latest issue of IEEE spectrum discusses modular robots--robots made of small, identical components or modules. These robots can slither, roll like a tank tread, inchworm, or crawl like a spider. The idea is that modular robots will be not only cheaper to build because the modules are all the same, but will be more able to repair themselves (by shedding damaged modules). Even cooler, each of the 5cm cube modules in Xerox PARC's polybot sports its own PowerPC 555 and 1mb ram."

Comments

Spliting and Merging

[regen]

Something that they really don't talk about in the article is spliting and merging robots. They talk about reconfiguration of a single robot, but I think spliting and merging with a group of robot would be very interesting.

Imagine a robot being able to break a portion of itself off and send it to perform a sub task. Imagine two robot getting together to cooperate on a task by combining and spliting apart again once the task was completed.