TAROS Acceptance

Our paper "Towards Self-repair with Modular Robots during Continuous Motion" has been accepted to the TAROS 2018 Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems conference. The paper itself describes the a novel method for self-repairing modular robot organisms by ejecting a failed module and replacing it with a working one, while other work has been done on self-repairing modular robots and robot groups, notably SYMBRION [L.Murray, Fault Tolerant Morphogenesis in Self-reconfigurable Modular Robotic Systems, PhD thesis, 2013] and Mergeable Nervous Systems [N.Mathews et al., Mergeable nervous systems for robots, Nature communications, 2017], this is the first project intending to repair while the robots continue in their group task, in the case of this study group locomotion. It is an extended abstract paper showing the planned experiments to compare our new dynamic self-repair strategy to existing stop-task-->repair-->start-again self-repair strategies and to methods where the robots just try to soldier on with their failed friend still in place. We think that the concept we are developing here should be also of use in situations where stopping to repair is impossible as well as those where continuing the group task during the self-repair process is merely desirable. This series of experiments is one of the key types of situation Omni-Pi-tent was designed to operate in, our plan is to start with V-REP simulations the move to real world hardware experiments later once enough Omni-Pi-tent modules are built. Progress now will concentrate on preparing the groundwork of the experiments to present at TAROS, on performing V-REP simulation experiments for dynamic repair strategies and on completing the development of the first hardware prototype which should be finished by late Autumn but hopefully sooner.

This concept for self-repair during continuous motion is also discussed at  https://www.york.ac.uk/robot-lab/dsr/ and in the published paper.