Eugen Meister

Symbiotic robot organisms: REPLICATOR and SYMBRION projects

Cooperation and competition among stand - alone swarm agents can increase the collective fitness of the whole system. An interesting form of collective system is demonstrated by some bacteria and fungi, which can build symbiotic organisms. Symbiotic communities can enable new functional capabilities which allow all members to survive better in their environment. In this article we show an overview of two large European projects dealing with new collective robotic systems which utilize principles derived from natural symbiosis. The paper provides also an overview of typical hardware, software and methodological challenges arose along these projects, as well as some prototypes and on-going experiments available on this stage.

Evolutionary robotics: The next-generation-platform for on-line and on-board artificial evolution

In this paper we present the development of a new self-reconfigurable robotic platform for performing on-line and on-board evolutionary experiments. The designed platform can work as an autonomous swarm robot and can undergo collective morphogenesis to actuate in different morphogenetic structures. The platform includes a dedicated power management, rich sensor mechanisms for on-board fitness measurement as well as very powerful distributed computational system to run learning and evolutionary algorithms. The whole development is performed within several large European projects and is open-hardware and open-software.

Reconfigurable swarm robots produce self-assembling and self-repairing organisms

Reconfigurable robots are set to become a vital factor in the theoretical development and practical utilization of robotics. The core problem in this scientific area is steady information transfer between a swarm and its organisms and vice versa. To this end, we present a basic theoretical framework that stipulates the interoperation between the two modes. We evaluate our proposed framework by constructing 100 mobile microrobots of three different types that initiate the processes of self-reconfigurability and self-repair. The autonomous decision to self-aggregate to an organism mainly derives from the necessity to overcome existing obstructive environmental conditions, e.g. ramps or clefts. The methodological dichotomy that we have chosen to evaluate our concept was to pursue in parallel an approach based on embodied distributed cognition and an evolutionary path mainly based on artificial genomes and reproduction. In this paper, we evaluate these two different approaches in two distinct grand challenges and present the main results.

A cognitive architecture for modular and self-reconfigurable robots

The field of reconfigurable swarms of modular robots has achieved a current status of performance that allows applications in diverse fields that are characterized by human support (e.g. exploratory and rescue tasks) or even in human-less environments. The main goal of the EC project REPLICATOR [1] is the development and deployment of a heterogeneous swarm of modular robots that are able to switch autonomously from a swarm of robots, into different organism forms, to reconfigure these forms, and finally to revert to the original swarm mode [2]. To achieve these goals three different types of robot modules have been developed and an extensive suite of embodied distributed cognition methods implemented [3]. Hereby the methodological key aspects address principles of self-organization. In order to tackle our ambitious approach a Grand Challenge has been proposed of autonomous operation of 100 robots for 100 days (100 days, 100 robots). Moreover, a framework coined the SOS-cycle (SOS: Swarm-Organism-Swarm) is developed. It controls the transitions between internal phases that enable the whole system to alternate between different modes mentioned above. This paper describes the vision of the Grand Challenge and the implementation and the results of the different phases of the SOS-cycle.

Active wheel - An autonomous modular robot

In this paper, a novel robotic platform is introduced, which is able to support other modular robots during the locomotion or self-repair process to increase efficiency of locomotion, payload and runtime. The robot is able to operate autonomous as a stand-alone robot in a swarm or aggregate into robot organisms. We outline the developmental phases of the final robot generation, including mechanics, electronics and software design.

Alignment of master and sample in comparative digital holography

A comparative digital holography system suitable for shape and deformation comparisons between master and sample objects with rough surfaces is described. The innovative aspect of comparative digital holography is the illumination of the sample by the conjugated wavefront of the master, as a type of coherent mask, using a liquid crystal display (LCD). The resulting interferogram indicates directly the shape or the deformation differences between the master and sample. As it is not necessary that both objects to be compared are located at the same place for this technique, remote shape or deformation comparison between a master and a sample is possible. A current research topic is the precise alignment of the sample and the reconstructed master wavefront so that the resulting phase map only contains information of the differences in shape or deformation. The reconstructed master wavefront can be adjusted digitally to correctly illuminate the sample object, by introducing an artificial phase-shift. This phase-shift is induced by the LCD, and offers also the possibility of calibrating precisely the set-up. The value for the phase-shift is obtained by a comparison of the resulting interferogram with a database containing fringes from simulations of misalignments between master and sample objects. Using the iterative algorithm described here, the correction of the sample position can be controlled by an automatic adaptation of the coherent mask.

Automatic onboard and online modelling of modular and self-reconfigurable robots

In this paper, we introduce a framework for automatic generation of dynamic equations for modular and reconfigurable robotic systems. The framework is developed in C++ and is capable to deal with both symbolic and numerical type of variables. For this reason, the model for kinematics and dynamics can either be formulated symbolically with high precisions or numerically if the computing time is for major interest. These capabilities makes it powerful for many different scientific and practical applications. The framework was first developed and evaluated in MATLAB and has been finally ported to modular robots running on an embedded processor. Different multi robot configurations have been evaluated and compared with simulation results.