Conference paper
Anatomy-based organization of modular robots
Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark1
Intel Research Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA2
This paper presents a novel biologically-inspired hierarchical approach to organizing and controlling modular robots. The purpose of our approach is to decompose the complexity of assembling and commanding a functional robot made of numerous simple modules (thousands to millions) by introducing a hierarchy of structure and control.
The robots we describe incorporate anatomically-inspired parts such as muscles, bones and joints, and these parts in turn are assembled from modules. Each of those parts encapsulates one or more functions, e.g. a muscle can contract. Control of the robot can then be cast as a problem of controlling its anatomical parts rather than each discrete module.
We show simulation results from experiments using gradient-based primitives to control parts of increasingly complex robots, including snake, crawler, cilia-surface, arm-joint-muscle and grasping robots. We conclude that this approach is promising for future many-modules systems, but is currently impractical on most existing platforms.
Language: | English |
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Publisher: | IEEE |
Year: | 2008 |
Pages: | 3141-3148 |
Proceedings: | 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) |
ISBN: | 1424416469 , 1424416477 , 9781424416462 and 9781424416479 |
ISSN: | 2577087x and 10504729 |
Types: | Conference paper |
DOI: | 10.1109/ROBOT.2008.4543689 |
Cells (biology) Contracts Crawlers Muscles Organizing Robot control Robot sensing systems Robotic assembly Robotics and automation USA Councils anatomically-inspired parts anatomy-based organization control hierarchy functional robot gradient-based primitives grasping robots intelligent robots mobile robots modular robots robot control structure hierarchy