Towards Energy Homeostasis in an Autonomous Self-Reconfigurable Modular Robotic Organism

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to artificial energy homeostasis in self-reconfigurable modular robots. Using self-monitoring and self-sufficiency principles, energy harvesting in a system of distributed energy sources is proposed. In conjunction with this, we propose an artificial immune system that incorporates on-board power management system for adaptive real time detection of errors which acts as an indicator to a robot to harvest energy from other robots within the local vicinity. Early experiments show that the Artificial Immune System affords a high level of error detection within the power module and will prove to be beneficial in maintaining overall performance of a robotic unit for long periods of time.