Swarm intelligence for self-reconfiguring walking robot

Abstract

A robust swarm intelligence based approach for the self-reconfiguration of a fault-tolerant multi-legged walking robot is elaborated in this paper. It is used to reconfigure the posture of the legs of the robot after some failure has occurred within the robotpsilas legs and it is based on the intrinsic properties seen within swarms and boids in nature. The reconfiguration method presented does not consider any conventional inverse kinematics modeling. Instead it is solely based on swarm intelligence concepts. Throughout the paper we describe the idea behind this approach, the principle of its operation, and we demonstrate its practical usefulness in several test-cases demonstrated on our hexapod robot - OSCAR (Organic Self Configuring and Adapting Robot).