Correct-by-Construction Approach for Self-Evolvable Robots
This addresses the need for more flexible and reliable robots in diverse tasks and environments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing reconfigurable robot concepts with formal methods.
The paper tackles the problem of designing reconfigurable robots that can adapt structurally and functionally, presenting a correct-by-construction strategy that guarantees task performance based on workspace descriptions and available modules, demonstrated with a planar multi-link manipulator.
The paper presents a new formal way of modeling and designing reconfigurable robots, in which case the robots are allowed to reconfigure not only structurally but also functionally. We call such kind of robots "self-evolvable", which have the potential to be more flexible to be used in a wider range of tasks, in a wider range of environments, and with a wider range of users. To accommodate such a concept, i.e., allowing a self-evovable robot to be configured and reconfigured, we present a series of formal constructs, e.g., structural reconfigurable grammar and functional reconfigurable grammar. Furthermore, we present a correct-by-construction strategy, which, given the description of a workspace, the formula specifying a task, and a set of available modules, is capable of constructing during the design phase a robot that is guaranteed to perform the task satisfactorily. We use a planar multi-link manipulator as an example throughout the paper to demonstrate the proposed modeling and designing procedures.