Abstract-This paper describes the design, fabrication, and experimental results of a programmable matter system capable of 2D shape formation through subtraction. The system is composed of autonomous 1cm modules which use customdesigned electropermanent magnets to bond, communicate, and share power with their neighbors. Given an initial block composed of many of these modules latched together in a regular crystalline structure, our system is able to form shapes by detaching the unnecessary modules. Many experiments show that the modules in our system are able to distribute data at 9600bps to their neighbors with a 98.5% success rate after four retries, and the connectors are able to support over 85 times the weight of a single module.
Gilpin et al. REF described the design, fabrication and experimental results for a programmable matter system capable of two-dimensional (2D) shape formation through subtraction.
Robot pebbles: One centimeter modules for programmable matter through self-disassembly
2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Engineering Computer Science