Research On Autonomous Docking And Distributed Coordination Control For Modular Reconfigurable Robot

Modular self-reconfigurable robot is a kind of complex system consisted with modules of the same esthesis and locomotor ability. It identifies the environment through simple perception of composed modules, completes reconfiguration and overall movement by each module with limited athletic ability, thus to execute varied tasks in different environment. Automated docking is an important research on self-reconfigurable robot. It is the key link in research of configuration transformation, self-repairing and robustness, therefore it owns a strong practical research value. In addition, locomotion control for the newborn configuration from automated docking, reconfiguration or self-repairing process is still an important subject to be considered.Our research focuses on automated docking and the coordinated locomotion control algorithm for UBot self-reconfigurable robot. We developed a sensor module equipped with multiple sensors for UBot to enhance cognitive capacity of the environment.To achieve precise docking between module group and the target module, a two-staged docking method has been proposed. This method can be described as:visual pre-positioning process and precise positioning through linear hall sensors. Subsequently, we proposed a distributed coordinated locomotion control algorithm. By spreading excitation pulse signals through the entire configuration, modules in the configuration will identify their connection status, distinguish the functional roles, after mapping to joint actions coordinated by the excitation pulse signal, the overall coordinated locomotion for the configuration is generated. This algorithm owns the properties of dynamic adaptability, scalability and asynchrony, it can adapt to the topology changes for the configuration and the number changes of component modules, thus to address the adaptive locomotion for the newborn configurations with a certain morphological features.Finally, an experimental system has been established for UBot to achieve automated docking, and the two-staged docking method has been proved to be effective by the experiments; The distributed coordinated locomotion control algorithm has been validated by the adaptive motion generated by the worm configuration.Finally, the whole process for the automated docking and coordinated movement of the created worm configuration was simulated in SPL environment.