Design and Steering Control of a Center-Articulated Mobile Robot Module

This paper discusses the design and steering control for an autonomous modular mobile robot. The module is designed with a center-articulated steering joint to minimize the number of actuators used in the chain. We propose a feedback control law which allows steering between configurations in the plane and show its application as a parking control to dock modules together. The control law is designed by Lyapunov techniques and relies on the equations of the robot in polar coordinates. A set of experiments have been carried out to show the performance of the proposed approach. The design is intended to endow individual wheeled modules with the capability to merge and make a single snake-like robot to take advantage of the benefits of modular robotics

Connection Mechanism for Autonomous Self-Assembly in Mobile Robots

ABSTRACKThis paper presents a connection mechanism for autonomous self-assembly in mobile robots. Using this connection mechanism, mobile robots can be autonomously connected and disconnected. The purpose of self-assembly in mobile robotics is to add a new capability to mobile robots, thus, improving their performance to best fit the terrain conditions. Construction of a reconnectable joint is of primary concern in such systems. In this paper, first the geometric conditions and force equations of a general docking mechanism are studied. Then, we discuss the design details of our connection mechanism and present some experimental results that show that the proposed mechanism overcomes significant alignment errors and is considerably power efficient.7 Halama