The Design of Communication Network for Dynamically Reconfigurable Robotic System

Abstract

An advanced Self-Organizing Manipulator System (SOMS) is introduced. The SOMS is a manipulator with modularized architecture, which is structured with modules called cells. This system is designed so as to reconfigure its own structure by itself depending on tasks and an environment. The SOMS is more task-oriented than other dynamically reconfigurable robotic systems, and characterized by its structuring strategy utilizing another specific manipulator for the SOMS assembly.

In this paper, the second version of the SOMS with a passive coupling mechanism and communication system with an optical connection is mentioned. At first, we introduced several types of cells for structuring the manipulator. Each cell has a distributed control system that can communicate with each other through the optical connection. These distributed control systems enhance intelligence of the cell. The new passive coupling mechanism is developed for down size of cell. Next, an optical connection for communication between cells to achieve improved reliability is described. Then, we discuss how to construct a communication network on the reconfigurable and distributed robotic system. It is found that packet filtering and routing mechanism is indispensable for the communication network to reduce traffic on the network, to achieve robustness, and to deal with changeable network topologies.