Locomotion through Reconfiguration based on Motor Primitives for Roombots Self-Reconfigurable Modular Robots

2012

Conference Paper

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We present the hardware and reconfiguration experiments for an autonomous self-reconfigurable modular robot called Roombots (RB). RB were designed to form the basis for self-reconfigurable furniture. Each RB module contains three degrees of freedom that have been carefully selected to allow a single module to reach any position on a 2-dimensional grid and to overcome concave corners in a 3-dimensional grid. For the first time we demonstrate locomotion capabilities of single RB modules through reconfiguration with real hardware. The locomotion through reconfiguration is controlled by a planner combining the well-known D* algorithm and composed motor primitives. The novelty of our approach is the use of an online running hierarchical planner closely linked to the real hardware.

@inproceedings{bonardi_locomotion_2012,
  title = {Locomotion through Reconfiguration based on Motor Primitives for Roombots Self-Reconfigurable Modular Robots},
  author = {Bonardi, Stephane and Moeckel, Rico and Spr{\"o}witz, Alexander and Vespignani, Massimo and Ijspeert, Auke Jan},
  booktitle = {Robotics; {Proceedings} of {ROBOTIK} 2012; 7th {German} {Conference} on},
  pages = {1--6},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {},
  url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6309485/}
}