This is fun. Take a steel ball and place a small two-wheel drive mechanism which sticks to the inside of the ball with the help of a magnet. Now make a few of them and you have a reconfigurable swarm.

The basic idea is very simple, and very similar to the well-known Sphero robots, but in this case the idea is to use them in a cooperative swarm.

As well as providing traction, The magnets, also provide a way that the robots - FreeBots - can join together.

 Now you have the general idea, take a look at some FreeBots in action:

The part of the exercise that really fascinates me is the way that you can invent swarm algorithms that make the FreeBots capable of doing more as a team than as individuals.

There are some problems, however. At the moment, the FreeBots are not autonomous and the metal shell presents a barrier between the electronics and the outside world. To charge the FreeBot you have to take it to pieces and, at the moment, there are no sensors. It isn't even clear what sensors are needed. How far could you get with an accelerometer based SLAM? At the very least, you need some sort of proximity measurement between the FreeBots and why not change the permanent magnet for an electromagnet?

The research team have their own plans:

More Information

FreeBOT: A Freeform Modular Self-reconfigurable Robot with Arbitrary Connection Point - Design and Implementation

Guanqi Liang, Ming Li and Huihuan Qian

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