Soft modular robot swarms - Future robot swarms with limited situational awareness operating in stressful and dynamic environments ranging from the micro- to macro-scale can benefit from studying emergent collective behaviors in physical robotic hardware. To enable such studies, we develop and study modular robot collectives capable of coordinating, communicating, and moving by sensing and inducing perturbations and strain in the collective. Below we show two types of soft / compliant modular robots. One type of modular robot changes its size and use strain sensors around its perimeter to determine its own state and its neighbor’s states, while the other soft modular robot uses switchable magnetic interactions to move about each other’s perimeters and reconfigure the group’s morphology.

Soft robotic oscillators enabling locomotion and synchronized force exertion.