SMORES-EP, modular robot, Modular Robotics Lab, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Two SMORES modules demonstrating their ability to move, connect, and manipulate metal objects.

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Video accompanying the paper "An End-to-End System for Accomplishing Tasks with Modular Robots", Best Systems Paper at RSS 2016.

Authors: Gangyuan Jing, Tarik Tosun, Mark Yim, and Hadas Kress-Gazit

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Video accompanying the paper "Accomplishing Tasks with Modular Robots." Authors: Gangyuan Jing, Tarik Tosun, Mark Yim, and Hadas Kress-Gazit.

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Self-reconfigurable modular robots are usually composed of multiple modules with uniform docking interfaces that can be transformed into different configurations by themselves. The reconfiguration planning problem is finding what sequence
of reconfiguration actions are required for one arrangement of modules to transform into another. We present a novel reconfiguration planning algorithm for modular robots. The algorithm compares the initial configuration with the goal configuration efficiently. The reconfiguration actions can be executed in a distributed manner so that each module can efficiently finish its reconfiguration task which results in a global reconfiguration
for the system. In the end, the algorithm is demonstrated on real modular robots and some example reconfiguration tasks are provided.

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