| Self Reconfigurable Robots (SRRs) are a system of many simple modules that can rearrange themselves to work together and better perform complicated tasks. They are in theory more extensible then traditional robotics. We investigate the particular problem of using SRRs to both explore and survey an unknown environment. The environment is explored by using the Robots internal sensors, and surveyed by placing a limited number of static sensors at ideal locations. The advantage of SRRs is that they can adapt to terrain difficulty by adjusting the number of individual robots on the field by reorganizing its modules. We test a distributed task driven implementation based on the ALLIANCE architecture in a simulated environment. The results show that SRRs are both able to cooperatively explore the environment as well as place sensors in useful locations, getting good results. |
