Roombots -- Mechanical Design of Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robots for Adaptive Furniture

We aim at merging technologies from information technology, roomware, and robotics in order to design adaptive and intelligent furniture. This paper presents design principles for our modular robots, called Roombots, as future building blocks for furniture that moves and self-reconfigures. The reconfiguration is done using dynamic connection and disconnection of modules and rotations of the degrees of freedom. We are furthermore interested in applying Roombots towards adaptive behaviour, such as online learning of locomotion patterns. To create coordinated and efficient gait patterns, we use a Central Pattern Generator (CPG) approach, which can easily be optimized by any gradient-free optimization algorithm. To provide a hardware framework we present the mechanical design of the Roombots modules and an active connection mechanism based on physical latches. Further we discuss the application of our Roombots modules as pieces of a homogenic or heterogenic mix of building blocks for static structures

An active connection mechanism for modular self-reconfigurable robotic systems based on physical latching

This article presents a robust and heavy duty physical latching connection mechanism, which can be actuated with DC motors to actively connect and disconnect modular robot units. The special requirements include a lightweight and simple construction providing an active, strong, hermaphrodite, completely retractable connection mechanism with a 90 degree symmetry1 and a no-energy consumption in the locked state. The mechanism volume is kept small to fit multiple copies into a single modular robot unit and to be used on as many faces of the robot unit as possible. This way several different lattice like modular robot structures are possible. The large selection for dock-able connection positions will likely simplify self-reconfiguration strategies. Tests with the implemented mechanism demonstrate its applicative potential for self-reconfiguring modular robot

Project course "Design of Mechatronic Systems"

The course "Design of Mechatronic Systems" at Technische Universität Ilmenau imparts the systematic procedure of mechatronic design. This paper shows the main features of VDI Guideline 2206, which provides the structured background for students education in mechatronics. Furthermore practical teaching experiences and results from the course are describe

Graph signature for self-reconfiguration planning

This project incorporates modular robots as building blocks for furniture that moves and self-reconfigures. The reconfiguration is done using dynamic connection / disconnection of modules and rotations of the degrees of freedom. This paper introduces a new approach to self-reconfiguration planning for modular robots based on the graph signature and the graph edit-distance. The method has been tested in simulation on two type of modules: YaMoR and M-TRAN. The simulation results shows interesting features of the approach, namely rapidly finding a near-optimal solutio

Graph signature for self-reconfiguration planning of modules with symmetry

In our previous works we had developed a framework for self-reconfiguration planning based on graph signature and graph edit-distance. The graph signature is a fast isomorphism test between different configurations and the graph edit-distance is a similarity metric. But the algorithm is not suitable for modules with symmetry. In this paper we improve the algorithm in order to deal with symmetric modules. Also, we present a new heuristic function to guide the search strategy by penalizing the solutions with more number of actions. The simulation results show the new algorithm not only deals with symmetric modules successfully but also finds better solutions in a shorter time