Autonomous Modular Robots

The theoretical ability of modular robots to reconfigure in response to complex tasks in a priori unknown environments has frequently been cited as an advantage and remains a major motivator for work in the field. We present a modular robot system capable of autonomously completing high-level tasks by reactively reconfiguring to meet the needs of …

Environment Augmentation with Modular Robots

We present a system enabling a modular robot to autonomously build structures in order to accomplish high-level tasks.  Building structures allows the robot to surmount large obstacles, expanding the set of tasks it can perform. This addresses a common weakness of modular robot systems, which often struggle to traverse large obstacles. This paper presents the …

A Flying Gripper Based on Cuboid Modular Robots

Grasping objects is a hard task that usually implies a dedicated mechanism (e.g arm, gripper) to the robot. Instead of adding extra components, have you thought about embedding the grasping capability to the robot itself? Have you also thought about whether we could do it flying? In the GRASP Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, …