SELF RECONFIGURABLE MODULAR ROBOT.

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN

Advanced Knowledge Application in Practice

The integration and interdependency of the world economy leads towards the creation of a global market that offers more opportunities, but is also more complex and competitive than ever before. Therefore widespread research activity is necessary if one is to remain successful on the market. This book is the result of research and development activities from a number of researchers worldwide, covering concrete fields of research

Motion Synthesis for the Self-reconfiguring Molecule

In this paper we present a geometric approach to specifying and planning the motion of robotic Molecules on a substrate of Molecules in O(n) time, where n is the number of Molecules in the substrate. We describe a language for specifying the Molecule motion. We give algorithms for performing global translations, rotations, and stacking of Molecular structures. We show that these motions are su#- cient to guarantee certain classes of motion for Molecular structures. We also examine a geometric approach to synthesizing language expressions for moving a Molecule on a substrate of other Molecules. 1 Introduction A self-reconfiguring robot consists of a set of identical modules that can dynamically and autonomously reconfigure in a variety of shapes, to best fit the terrain, environment, and task. Self-reconfiguration leads to versatile robots that can support multiple modalities of locomotion and manipulation. For example, a self-reconfiguring robot can aggregate as a snake to traverse a..