A metamorphic robotic system is a collection of robotic modules, each of which has the ability to connect, disconnect, and climb over adjacent modules. A change in the macroscopic shape of the system results from the locomotion of each module over its neighbors. We begin this video with a computer simulation of a metamorphic system, and then demonstrate a mechanism which was designed to allow modules of a metamorphic robotic system to connect and disconnect. The connector design is critical for this type of robot because a metamorphic robotic system may frequently need to reconfigure, and so the connection between modules must be reliable, and must function well even when significant position error exists. This video concludes with hardware demonstrations of module locomotion sequences. For a more detailed description of metamorphic robotic systems see:
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Pamecha et al. (2005) studied this question.