RhoMorph: Rhombus-shaped Deformable Modular Robots for Stable, Medium-Independent Reconfiguration Motion
This work addresses the problem of medium-independent reconfiguration for modular robots, offering a novel design that is incremental in improving stability and simplicity.
The paper introduces RhoMorph, a rhombus-shaped modular robot designed for stable reconfiguration across diverse environments, achieving reliable morphing and docking with minimal control complexity.
In this paper, we present RhoMorph, a novel deformable planar lattice modular self-reconfigurable robot (MSRR) with a rhombus shaped module. Each module consists of a parallelogram skeleton with a single centrally mounted actuator that enables folding and unfolding along its diagonal. The core design philosophy is to achieve essential MSRR functionalities such as morphing, docking, and locomotion with minimal control complexity. This enables a continuous and stable reconfiguration process that is independent of the surrounding medium, allowing the system to reliably form various configurations in diverse environments. To leverage the unique kinematics of RhoMorph, we introduce morphpivoting, a novel motion primitive for reconfiguration that differs from advanced MSRR systems, and propose a strategy for its continuous execution. Finally, a series of physical experiments validate the module's stable reconfiguration ability, as well as its positional and docking accuracy.