Kohji Tomita

About

Kohji Tomita is a pioneering roboticist whose career has been defined by groundbreaking contributions to self-reconfigurable modular robotics. He is best known as a principal architect of the M-TRAN (Modular Transformer) robotic system, a landmark platform in distributed robotics that demonstrated how homogeneous robotic modules could autonomously change configuration and generate diverse locomotion patterns. First introduced in 2002 and accumulating over 568 citations, M-TRAN bridged the gap between "lattice-type" and "string-type" modular robot architectures — a conceptual synthesis that influenced an entire generation of robotics researchers. Tomita's subsequent work on M-TRAN III (271 citations) refined connection mechanisms and explored sophisticated distributed control strategies, while his research on automatic locomotion design (222 citations) tackled the complex challenge of generating whole-body motion across variable configurations. His development of generic, decentralized control algorithms inspired by cellular automata further broadened the field's theoretical foundations, making his methods applicable beyond any single hardware platform. With over 1,700 citations across his most influential works, Tomita's research has profoundly shaped how scientists approach adaptable robotics for unknown and extreme environments.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   M-TRAN: self-reconfigurable modular robotic system

   568 citations · 2002
2. 2
   Distributed Self-Reconfiguration of M-TRAN III Modular Robotic System

   271 citations · 2008
3. 3
   Automatic Locomotion Design and Experiments for a Modular Robotic System

   222 citations · 2005
4. 4
   Hardware design of modular robotic system

   136 citations · 2002
5. 5
   Generic Decentralized Control for Lattice-Based Self-Reconfigurable Robots

   124 citations · 2004
6. 6
   Generic decentralized control for a class of self-reconfigurable robots

   103 citations · 2003
7. 7
   A Self-Reconfigurable Modular Robot: Reconfiguration Planning and Experiments

   98 citations · 2002
8. 8
   Self-reconfigurable modular robot - experiments on reconfiguration and locomotion

   88 citations · 2002
9. 9
   Automatic locomotion pattern generation for modular robots

   80 citations · 2004
10. 10
    Distributed adaptive locomotion by a modular robotic system, M-TRAN II

    65 citations · 2005

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links