Abstract
One of the most graceful phenomena widely observed in nature is self-assembly; living systems spontaneously assemble their body structure through the developmental process. While this remarkable phenomenon still remains much to be understood in biology, the concept of self-assembly becomes undeniably indispensable also in artificial systems as they increase in size and complexity. Based on this consideration, this paper discusses the realization of self-assembly with the use of a multi-robot system. The main contributions of this paper are concerns the exploitation of emergent phenomena stemming from the interplay between the control and mechanical systems, this allows us to significantly simplity the control algorithms required for the spontaneous self-assembly. Preliminary simulation results show that stable self-assembly is achieved irrespective of the initial positional relationship between the modules.
