High-level control of modular robots

Abstract

Reconfigurable modular robots can exhibit different specializations by rearranging the same set of parts comprising them. Actuating modular robots can be complicated because of the many degrees of freedom that scale exponentially with the size of the robot. Effectively controlling these robots directly relates to how well they can be used to complete meaningful tasks. This paper discusses an approach for creating provably correct controllers for modular robots from high-level tasks defined with structured English sentences. While this has been demonstrated with simple mobile robots, the problem was enriched by considering the uniqueness of reconfigurable modular robots. These requirements are expressed through traits in the high-level task specification that store information about the geometry and motion types of a robot.Given a high-level problem definition for a modular robot, the approach in this paper deals with generating all lower levels of control needed to solve it. Information about different robot characteristics is stored in a library, and two tools for populating this library have been developed. The first approach is a physics-based simulator and gait creator for manual generation of motion gaits. The second is a genetic algorithm framework that uses traits to evaluate performance under various metrics. Demonstration is done through simulation and with the CKBot hardware platform.

Accomplishing high-level tasks with modular robots

“…In [4], Castro et al introduce a high-level control framework for the CKBot modular robot. This framework lays the theoretical foundations for our high-level mission planner, one of the four major components of our system.…”

High-level control of modular robots

“…In other words, this paper captures a holistic solution for using modular robots to solve problems that humans can deem useful and significant. This paper builds directly on [8] with more theoretical detail and examples. In addition, a Genetic Algorithm framework (mentioned in Section 2.6.2) was developed to automate motion generation for modular robots.…”

An End-To-End System for Accomplishing Tasks with Modular Robots

“…Our work differentiates itself from [4] in several ways. We expand the notion of behavior properties to include both behavior and environmental properties, increasing the expressiveness and granularity of task specification.…”

“…Castro et al [4] introduce high-level control for the CKBot modular robot, and lay the theoretical foundation for our highlevel mission planner. Our work differentiates itself from [4] in several ways.…”

“…Most of is work has focused on traditional robot systems with a fixed configuration and a finite set of action capabilities, with the exception of [4] which presents a framework to synthesize controllers for a modular robot system from high-level task specifications.…”