Gradient-based routing protocol for modular robotic systems

Applicable potentials of a modular robotic system is dependent on the quality of intercommunication of robotic building blocks. In this paper, we present a gradient-based routing protocol for modular robotic systems. The distributed communication protocol was built up by local directional communication of neighbouring modules. In addition to the key features of neighbourhood discovery and awareness as well as link maintenance and recovery, the distributed communication protocol is leveraged by a gradient-based routing algorithm enabling robotic modules to automatically establish a directional communication route in reconfigurable structures. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our gradient-based algorithm through an education and entertainment application on our newly developed modular robotic system.