Abstract: Over several decades, robots have been successfully applied in industries, and in recent years, we are beginning to notice the utilization of robots in many more environments and fields. For example, in Japan, robots are considered to be one of the key technologies in supporting an aging society with reduced workforce. In the near future, the applications of robots in welfare, medical and daily life will be very important. Although we are facing increasing demands of various robots, the construction of process of robots still depends heavily on human designs, which make the production costs very high. In this study, hardware robotics modules with adaptive connection topology are built. These modules can be arbitrarily connected to each other and adaptively change the connection topology according to a given evaluation function, so that they can produce a macro behavior as a robot. The self-organizing behavior of the proposed hardware module potential enables us to significantly simplify the production process of robots. Initial experiments to adaptively built small robots will be explained.

Bio Sketch: Pitoyo Hartono received B.Eng, M. Eng, and Dr. Eng, from Department of Applied Physics, Waseda University, Tokyo in 1993, 1995 and 2002 respectively. From 2001-2005 he worked as a Research Associate and Visiting Lecturer in Waseda University. Since 2005 he has been an Associate Professor in Future University-Hakodate, Japan. His research interests include Machine Learning, Evolutionary Computation and Adaptive Robotics.