Heterogeneity for Increasing Performance and Reliability of Self-Reconfigurable Multi-Robot Organisms

Homogeneity and heterogeneity represent a well-known trade-off in the design of modular robot systems. This work addresses the heterogeneity concept, its rationales, design choices and performance evaluation. We introduce challenges for self-reconfigurable systems, show advances of mechatronic and software design of heterogeneous platforms and discuss experiments, which intend to demonstrate usability and performance of this system.