Resource-sharing boosts robotic resilience - Robohub

Researchers at EPFL’s Reconfigurable Robotics Laboratory, led by Jamie Paik, have developed a novel modular origami robot that improves resilience by sharing critical resources—power, communication, and sensing—among its individual modules. This approach, termed "hyper-redundancy," counters the traditional problem in modular robotics where adding more units increases the chance of failure. By enabling local resource sharing across all modules without altering the robot’s physical structure, the team reversed the typical trend of decreased reliability with more components, allowing the robot to maintain functionality even when one module is completely disabled. In experiments with the Mori3 robot, composed of four triangular modules, the researchers demonstrated that when the central module was deprived of power, sensing, and communication, the neighboring modules compensated for these losses through shared resources. This enabled the robot to successfully navigate complex terrain and perform tasks such as walking toward and passing under a barrier, effectively "reviving" the dead module. The study highlights how this resource-sharing framework, inspired