SELF-RECONFIGURABLE ROBOTS: AN OVERVIEW

SELF-RECONFIGURABLE ROBOTS: AN OVERVIEW

ABSTRACT:

One of the most challenging aspects of construction of a robot is designing of an architecture that reacts or adapts to change in the environment. Metamorphic or reconfigurable robots offer a new approach in robotics which deals with the design and creation of robots that can resemble and can reconfigure into new body shapes, with locomotive and sensory primitives suitable for many different tasks. The key to the concept of rapid reconfiguration and deployment lies in the "plug-and-play" component-based technology. As the robots are complex elements in a manufacturing cell, kinematics, control and coordination of robotic systems are sophisticated compared to other elements/equipment in a cell. To cope with rapid change of task requirements in the production line while maintaining inter-operability of components, use of mixed-module design is necessary. Robots with serial, parallel or hybrid geometries can be constructed for tasks requiring different accuracy, stiffness, and dexterity, etc. Key components, such as actuators and grippers/fixtures, can be interchangeable among different robots and devices. In principle, all of the robots and motion stages in the workcell are constructed using standard fixed-dimension modules and easy-to-fabricate variable-dimension modules. Because of the modular design, the reconfigurable workcell system can achieve optimal design at the component level but may not obtain optimal performance at the system level. Task-driven robot configuration optimization becomes necessary to establish sub-optimal performance for the overall robotic workcell. The problem of robot configuration optimization can be solved by the master-slave agent architecture .In this master-slave agent architecture, the slave agents, also the mobile agents representing arbitrary robot configurations will be dispatched to a cluster of networked computers.

This paper attempts to throw light on the concept of robotics with respect to reconfigurable robots. The paper gives a brief introduction to the field of robotics and describes the issues and constraints involved in the architectural design of metamorphic robots.

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