System Level Modeling and Control Design of hTetrakis–A Polyiamond Inspired Self-Reconfigurable Floor Tiling Robot

Abstract

Fixed morphology cleaning robots mostly face significant challenges in cleaning the narrow spaces in the environment. To overcome this, a new class of self-reconfigurable floor cleaning robot, hTetrakis, made of four triangular blocks, is built. This paper focuses on the modeling and controller design of the locomotion and reconfiguration mechanism of the platform. The locomotion of the platform with respect to the velocity of the wheels is formulated based on the kinematic analysis. By modeling the system in Simscape multibody toolbox of Matlab, the maneuverability of the platform is studied. The reconfiguration of the platform is studied based on the dynamics of individual block about the hinged joint. The control architecture of this platform has two distinct Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers to eliminate the position error during reconfiguration, and to maintain the platform's velocity. The coverage path planning of the platform is based on the classical Travelling Salesman Problem which finds the optimal sequence of waypoints as per the minimal energy consumption. Real time experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes in terms of eliminating the velocity errors, and maintaining the desired trajectory. INDEX TERMS Polyiamond, self-reconfigurable robots, path planning, system level modeling, area coverage.

Coverage Path Planning for Decomposition Reconfigurable Grid-Maps Using Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Travelling Salesman Problem

“…Since these grid representations only approximate the shape of the environment and its obstacles, grid-based methods were classified as approximate cellular decomposition methods [16]. These methods decompose the environment into specific grid shapes such as rectangles [17], triangles [18], or tetromino [19], rhombus [20]. Usually, each grid's size is square in shape and set to the same size as the robot to reduce unexplored areas.…”

Locomotion with Pedestrian Aware from Perception Sensor by Pavement Sweeping Reconfigurable Robot

“…The first is a robot that comprises a group of intelligent modules, and the second is a robot that comprises of a group of modules where the intelligence comes from an external agent. In our previous work, we have classified self-reconfigurable robots into three categories which are nested reconfigurability [ 16 , 17 , 18 ], intra reconfigurability [ 19 , 20 ], and inter reconfigurability [ 21 , 22 ]. The hTetro described earlier has nested reconfigurability.…”

Toward Pleomorphic Reconfigurable Robots for Optimum Coverage

“…In this regard, various designs of reconfigurable robots intended for floor cleaning have been proposed. hTetro [23], hTetrakis [24], hTetran [25], and h-Trihex [26] can be considered as examples. A reconfigurable robot could access narrow spaces to a greater extent due to its ability to reconfigure into different morphologies.…”

“…Diverse aspects of this class of tiling robots have been studied to improve their productivity in floor cleaning applications. In this regard, much work on the realization of complete area coverage through efficient path planning through evolutionary algorithms and machine learning has been investigated [24,27]. Low-level controlling functionalities of robots, such as path tracking abilities, have also been extensively studied [26,27].…”