Towards a team of robots with reconfiguration and repair capabilities

In the future, we propose that there will be largely self-sufficient robot colonies operating on distant planets and in harsh environments here on Earth. A highly desirable quality of such a colony would be the capability of the robots to repair each other. Towards the goal of autonomous repair, we design a robot that can replace the modules composing a similar robot. The final system is teleoperated and module removal/replacement is performed on a test bed. We discuss some of the design trade-offs for such a system and discuss some of the steps required in order to develop a self-sufficient robot colony.