• Title:: “Modular Robotics and Locomotion”

• Duration: 1 hour

• Event: Open seminar for research people.

• Place:: TAMS group. FB Informatik. Uni Hamburg. .

• Date: April-18^th- 2006

• Talker: Juan González Gómez (Escuela Politécnica Superior, UAM)

Abstract

The main goal of the modular robotics is to build robots from simple modules and to study its properties. Two of the most advanced modular robots in the world are Polybot and M-TRAN, from PARC and AIST groups respectively. Both are self-reconfigurable robots, that means that they can automatically change their shapes.

The Y1 modules have been designed to start researching in modular robotics. They are a very cheap and easy-to-build modules. Different robot configurations can be created by linking these modules in different ways and its locomotion capabilities can be studied.

Three different minimal configurations have been built. These are the robots with the minimal number of modules that can move in 1D and 2D. Their locomotion capabilities are analized.

More complex robots can be created by joining the Y1 modules in different ways: worm-like robots and snake-like robots. The former are composed of Y1 modules in the same orientation and moving around the pitch axis. These robots only can move in one dimension. The latter comprises modules that rotates around the pitch and yaw axes respectively. They can perform different locomotion gaits, like turning, rolling, rotating, lateral shifting and sinusoidal moving.

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Presentation slides

modular-robotics-tams-april-2006.pdf (1,8 MB)	Slides in PDF format
modular-robotics-tams-april-2006.odp (5,2 MB)	Presentation sources for OpenOffice 2.0

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Aditional information

• Paper: “Motion of Minimal Configurations of a Modular Robot: Sinusoidal, Lateral Rolling and Lateral Shift”

• Paper: “Locomotion of a Modular Worm-like Robot using a FPGA-based embeded MicroBlaze Soft-processor”

• Cube Revolutions worm-like robot (in Spanish)

• Y1 modules (in Spanish)

• Locomotion capabilities of the pitch-yaw connecting robot:

  • Sinusoidal movement [Video].

  • Turning [Video]

  • Lateral shifting [Video].

  • Rotating [Video]

  • Rolling [Video]

• Minimal configurations in 1D and 2D

• PP: Pitch-pitch configuration. [Video]

• PYP: Pitch-yaw-pitch configuration. [Video 1] [Video 2] [Video 3] [Video 4]

• Three-points star configuration. Minimal configuration in 2D. [Video 1] [Video 2

• Pitch-connecting modular robot, composed of 8 linked modules.

  • Sinusoidal movement: [Video]

  • Caterpillar locomotion: [Video]

  • Rolling wheel: [Video

News

• 22/May/2006: Web page published

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