In summary, we argue that improvement capabilities of terrestrial swarms of robots can be achieved via the judicious interaction of relatively simple units. We also demonstrate the swarm capabilities through multirobot object transport. A systematic study of performance of linked units leads to new discoveries of the emergent obstacle navigation capabilities of multilegged robots.

When tasks become terradynamically challenging for individuals to perform alone, the individuals suffer performance degradation. Here, we report a reconfigurable swarm of identical low-cost quadruped robots (with directionally flexible legs and tail) that can be linked on demand and autonomously. To advance the field of terradynamically capable swarming robotics, inspired by the capabilities of multilegged organisms, we hypothesize that legged robots consisting of reversibly chainable modular units with appropriate passive perturbation management mechanisms can perform diverse tasks in variable terrain without complex control and sensing. Swarms of ground-based robots are presently limited to relatively simple environments, which we attribute in part to the lack of locomotor capabilities needed to traverse complex terrain. Thus, we confirmed that target exploration in a large environment would be possible by crawler robots with Lévy flight and significant variances in the detection rate among the positions to detect the outdoor environment’s target. The results suggest that the swarm crawler robots with Lévy flight succeeded in the target’s discovery in the indoor environment with a 100% success rate, and were able to find several targets in a given time in the outdoor environment.

This paper investigated the search performance of swarm crawler robots with Lévy flight on target detection problems in large environments through a series of real robots’ experiments.

Our previous results confirmed that Lévy flight outperformed the usual random walk for exploration strategy in an indoor environment. When a robot detects a target, the robot must be connected with a base station via intermediate relay robots for wireless communication. This study tackles the task of swarm robotics, where robots explore the environment to detect targets.

Autorobot data system 2.12