Accomplishing High-Level Tasks with Modular Robots
This work addresses the challenge of selecting appropriate configurations and behaviors for modular robots to realize their flexibility, but it is incremental as it builds on earlier work by extending the system with environmentally adaptive parametric behaviors.
The authors tackled the problem of enabling modular self-reconfigurable robots to accomplish high-level, multi-part tasks by developing an integrated system with four components, and demonstrated its capability in hardware experiments.
The advantage of modular self-reconfigurable robot systems is their flexibility, but this advantage can only be realized if appropriate configurations (shapes) and behaviors (controlling programs) can be selected for a given task. In this paper, we present an integrated system for addressing high-level tasks with modular robots, and demonstrate that it is capable of accomplishing challenging, multi-part tasks in hardware experiments. The system consists of four tightly integrated components: (1) A high-level mission planner, (2) A large design library spanning a wide set of functionality, (3) A design and simulation tool for populating the library with new configurations and behaviors, and (4) modular robot hardware. This paper builds on earlier work by the authors, extending the original system to include environmentally adaptive parametric behaviors, which integrate motion planners and feedback controllers with the system.