International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems ARTICLE Nested Reconfigurable Robots: Theory, Design, and Realization Regular Paper Ning Tan1*, Nicolas Rojas2, Rajesh Elara Mohan1, Vincent Kee3 and Ricardo Sosa4 1 Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore 2 Yale University, New Haven, USA 3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA 4 Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand *Corresponding author(s) E-mail:
[email protected] Received 10 September 2014; Accepted 9 February 2015 DOI: 10.5772/60507 © 2015 Author(s). Licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Keywords Nested reconfiguration, Modular robot, Self- Rather than the conventional classification method, we reconfigurable, Tetromino propose to divide modular and reconfigurable robots into intra-, inter-, and nested reconfigurations. We suggest designing the robot with nested reconfigurability, which utilizes individual robots with intra-reconfigurability 1. Introduction capable of combining with other homogeneous/heteroge‐ neous robots (inter-reconfigurability). The objective of this The design philosophy of reconfigurability has been approach is to generate more complex morphologies for studied and applied to robotics since the 1980s. A number performing specific tasks that are far from the capabilities of reconfigurable robotic systems have been proposed of a single module or to respond to programmable assem‐ thereafter [1, 2, 3]. Many practical applications prove that bly requirements. In this paper, we discuss the theory, reconfigurability is a very valuable design strategy.