Exploit Morphology to Simplify Docking of Self-reconfigurable Robots

In this paper we demonstrate how to dock two self-reconfigurable robots and as a result merge them into one large robot. The novel feature of our approach is that the configuration we choose for our robots allows the robots to handle misalignment errors and dock simply by pushing against each other. In 90 experiments with the ATRON self-reconfigurable robot we demonstrate that two three-module robots can dock in 16 seconds without using sensors and are successful in between 93% and 40% of the attempts depending on approach angle and offset. While this is a modest step towards fast and reliable docking, we conclude that choosing appropriate configurations for docking is a significant tool for speeding up docking.