Research on Reconfiguration Strategies for Self-reconfiguring Modular Robots: A Review

With the progress of science and technology, the traditional robot workplace is fixed, single-function, and inflexible, and may not work properly in some special places, while the modular robot with self-reconfiguration function is a robot that can adapt to new environments and can rely on new task settings, which has a series of universal modules and relies on mutual communication between modules and autonomous reorganization movements to cope with changes in the environment or tasks and recover from the state of destruction. This paper summarizes the representative international research results from the perspective of the hardware design of robots in two aspects based on the design characteristics of self-reconfiguring modular robots around the reconfiguration strategy planning method. At the same time, some existing problems and shortcomings are pointed out on this basis to provide ideas as well as perspectives for future research development.