'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
We present a robust and compact meta-module for edge-hinged modular robot units such as M-TRAN,
SuperBot, SMORES, UBot, PolyBot and CKBot, as well as for central-point-hinged ones such as Molecubes and
Roombots. Thanks to the rotational degrees of freedom of these units, the novel meta-module is able to expand
and contract, as to double/halve its length in each dimension. Moreover, for a large class of edge-hinged robots the
proposed meta-module also performs the scrunch/relax and transfer operations required by any tunneling-based
reconfiguration strategy, such as those designed for Crystalline and Telecube robots. These results make it possible to
apply efficient geometric reconfiguration algorithms to this type of robots. We prove the size of this new meta-module to
be optimal. Its robustness and performance substantially improve over previous results.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
