This is the overview page for research I have done in the past. My research interests (during my early graduate school career) mostly focused on self-reconfiguration or the problem of how to instruct a collection of connected robotic modules to rearrange themselves from an initial into some target configuration or shape.
As you can imagine, solving this problem is hard enough to do in simulation. However, only simulating collections of robots (especially as a roboticist) became less satisfying over time. In my head the idea of building a robot swarm to test self-reconfiguration ideas on physical hardware began to take shape. To simplify the task of building a robot swarm, I decided to start with 2D reconfiguration and wheeled robots. A “module” in my self-reconfigurable swarm would be a wheeled robot (what later became the GRITSBot). These robots would initially not connect to one another but just form shapes by standing next to one another. And thus I fell into the rabbit hole of building actual hardware…
