In this episode we talk to Haruhisa Kurokawa, who is the head of the Distributed System Design Research Group, Intelligent Systems Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. His main research interests include kinematics of mechanisms, distributed autonomous systems, and nonlinear control.

He presents one the leading robots in the area of self-reconfigurable modular robotics, the M-TRAN III (Modular Transformer). Their robots can change shape to walk, slither or crawl and climb over various obstacles on the way (movies). From locomotion to self-reconfiguration he presents the challenges in control and planning and gives us some insight as to what is still needed for modular robots to automatically become the cup of coffee we so badly need.

Links:

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• Haruhisa Kurokawa's homepage