The Autonomous Reconfiguration And Docking Strategy Research For Self Reconfigurable Robot With M~2SBot

Self-reconfigurable modular robot is composed of several standard modules, and it has different configurations to adapt to the different environment or tasks by changing the connection relationship between two modulars. The connecting mechanism, reconfiguration and autonomous docking are all the key research fields for the self-reconfigurable modular robot. So, the three areas above are studyed and analyzed in this paper.A new type of modular of mobile chain self-reconfigurable modular robot is proposed.And a mechanical connecting mechanism is designed. The connection characteristic is presented and the docking error of the connecting mechanism is also analyzed to provide basis of judgment for autonomous docking.The Spatial Connection Matrix(SCM) is put forward to the study of reconfiguration of the self-reconfigurable modular robot, which can descript the robot topological spatial structure completely. Combined the connection status of two modulars, the corner information of each modular can describe the whole space structure of robot comprehensively. The motion branches of the robot and these kinematics equations can be given by the SCM to provide basis of judgment for reconfiguration. A unnumbered distributed reconfiguration strategy is proposed based on the connection limitment among modules and movement characteristics of the modular, which can remove the common structure between the initial and goal configurations to improve the efficiency of the reconfiguration. Research on the autonomous docking of the self-configurable robot, a docking algorithm in 3D space is proposed in this paper, which combines the public points method based on Rodrigo matrix and the climbing searching algorithm based on the energy function to correct motion errors in the docking process to achieve the docking. At least three groups of sensors receive signals when the modular evaluats the offsets with the algorithm, so the search scope of the offset angles will be expanded. And,the paper analyzes the docking strategy when the distance between two modulars is very long, and in the simulation experiment verifies the validity of the algorithm and strategy.Finally, the reconfiguration and autonomous docking in the simulation of the initial configuration to the goal configuration conversion are analyzed, and the applicability of the reconfiguration and autonomous docking strategys are verified further.