Experiments and Results

Abstract

This chapter presents the results of the experiments conducted to explore the behavior of a modular robotic organism with the proposed hardware and the application software features in the simulation framework. In the first half, the chapter presents the experimental results obtained after integrating the proposed power management system in the hardware design of the real robotic modules during artificial trophallaxis, power sharing and an emulated fault condition. In the second half of the chapter, the application software, implemented in the simulation framework, is tested by simulations. The simulation experiments are broadly divided into two parts: power sharing and fault tolerance. The power sharing simulation experiments include the simulations of dynamic power sharing in two exemplary organism morphologies. The fault tolerance simulation experiments include the results obtained by adapting the procedure defined in the fault detection and identification and fault isolation algorithms, during different fault situations. At the end, a brief summary concludes the chapter.