Experiments on fault-tolerant self-reconfiguration and emergent self-repair

This paper presents a series of experiments on fault tolerant self-reconfiguration of the ATRON robotic system. For self-reconfiguration we use a previously described distributed control strategy based on meta-modules that emerge, move and stop. We perform experiments on three different types of failures: 1) Action failure: On the physical platform we demonstrate how roll-back of actions are used to achieve tolerance to collision with obstacles and other meta-modules. 2) Module failure: In simulation we show, for a 500 module robot, how different degrees of catastrophic module failure affect the robot’s ability to shape-change to support an insecure roof. 3) Robot failure: In simulation we demonstrate how robot faults such as a broken robot bone can be emergent self-repaired by exploiting the redundancy of selfreconfigurable modules. We conclude that the use of emergent, distributed control, action roll-back, module redundancy, and self-reconfiguration can be used to achieve fault tolerant, self-repairing robots.
Keyword: Distributed control,Emergent phenomena,Self-adjusting systems,Redundancy,Fault tolerance,Robots