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Anatomy-based organization of morphology and control in self-reconfigurable modular robots

  • Swarm Robotics
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Abstract

In this paper, we address the challenge of realizing full-body behaviors in scalable modular robots. We present an experimental study of a biologically inspired approach to organize the morphology and control of modular robots. The approach introduces a nested hierarchy that decomposes the complexity of assembling and commanding a functional robot made of numerous simple modules. The purpose is to support versatility, scalability, and provide design abstraction. The robots we describe incorporate anatomy-inspired parts such as muscles, bones, and joints, and these parts in turn are assembled from modules. Each of those parts encapsulates one or more functions, e.g., a muscle can contract. Control of the robot can then be cast as a problem of controlling its anatomical parts rather than each discrete module. To validate this approach, we perform experiments with micron-scale spherical catom modules in simulation. The robots we simulate are increasingly complex and include snake, crawler, quadruped, cilia surface, arm-joint-muscle, and grasping robots. We conclude that this is a promising approach for future microscopic many-modules systems, but also that it is not applicable to relatively weak and slow homogeneous systems such as the centimeter-scale ATRON.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Maersk McKinney Moller Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230, Odense M, Denmark

    David Johan Christensen & Kasper Stoy

  2. Intel Research Pittsburgh, 4720 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Jason Campbell

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  1. David Johan Christensen
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  2. Jason Campbell
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  3. Kasper Stoy
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Correspondence to David Johan Christensen.

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Christensen, D.J., Campbell, J. & Stoy, K. Anatomy-based organization of morphology and control in self-reconfigurable modular robots. Neural Comput & Applic 19, 787–805 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-010-0387-3

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