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This paper presents our work towards a decentralized reconfiguration strategy for self-reconfiguring modular robots, assembling furniture-like structures from Roombots (RB) metamodules. We explore how reconfiguration by locomotion from a configuration A to a configuration B can be controlled in a distributed fashion. This is done using Roombots metamodules-two Roombots modules connected serially-that use broadcast signals, lookup tables of their movement space, assumptions about their neighborhood, and connections to a structured surface to collectively build desired structures without the need of a centralized planner.

VIDEO OVERVIEWThe video presents the first results of a Swiss-funded project focusing on symbiotic peer-to-peer interaction and cooperation between humans and robot swarms. As a first step, we considered human-swarm interaction, and selected the use of hand gestures to let a human communicate with a swarm of relatively simple mobile robots. In our scenario, a hand gesture encodes a command, that the swarm will execute. The robots that we used are the foot-bots, developed in the Swarmanoid project [1].Hand gestures are a powerful and intuitive way to communicate, and do not require the use of additional devices. However, real-time vision-based recognition of hand gestures is a challenging task for the single foot-bot, due to its limited processing power and field of view. We investigated how to exploit robot mobility, swarm spatial distribution, and multihop wireless communications, to let the robots in the swarm: (i) implement a distributed and cooperative sensing of hand gestures, and (ii) robustly reach a consensus about a gesture.The first step was to use 13 foot-bots to collect 70,000 hand gestures images representing finger counts (from 0 to 5) and five furniture-like shapes. With this data set we trained .

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Abstract-Roombots (RB) are self-reconfigurable modular robots designed to study robotic reconfiguration on a structured grid and adaptive locomotion off grid. One of the main goals of this platform is to create adaptive furniture inside living spaces such as homes or offices. To ease the control of RB modules in these environments, we propose a novel and more natural way of interaction with the RB modules on a RB grid, called the Natural Roombots User Interface. In our method, the user commands the RB modules using pointing gestures. The user's body is tracked using multiple Kinects. The user is also given real-time visual feedback of their physical actions and the state of the system via LED illumination electronics installed on both RB modules and the grid. We demonstrate how our interface can be used to efficiently control RB modules on simple point-to-point grid locomotion and conclude by discussing future extensions.