Reconfigurable robot swarms exhibit the ability to perform collaborative tasks, change morphologies, and traverse challenging terrains beyond the capability of a single robot. On mobile robot platforms, it is challenging to incorporate both individual mobility, and coupling and reconfiguration capabilities. In this paper, we present two mechanisms to enable obstacle ascent and descent behaviors to enhance the locomotion capabilities of reconfigurable swarm robots, based on the PuzzleBot swarm. These mechanisms, simple 1-DOF arms attached to the front of the robots, leverage the swarm’s flexible, passive coupling to reduce energy consumption when performing these added locomotion tasks. They also only require a single added mechanism to perform these tasks, using the passive coupling to continue behaviors once initiated by the mechanisms. We present the design and modeling of these mechanisms, as well as the various behaviors enabled by the added degree of freedom. We show the results of mechanism characterization and hardware experiments that evaluate the gap crossing, obstacle descent, climbing, and lifting behaviors of the reconfigurable robot swarm. Compared with the previous PuzzleBots, we demonstrate significant improvement in the above-mentioned tasks with controlled experiments. Finally, we show that the robots can perform in real-world scenarios outside of a lab environment. Video available at https://youtu.be/-VvjX-nyTUE .