Design of a modular mobile multi robot system: ULGEN (Universal-Generative Robot)

Field of robotics consists a variety of disciplines, such as mechanical, computer and electronics engineering. In a traditional design approach, a humanoid, mobile robots and industrial robots have a certain amount of actuators and sensors. These robots have pre-defined workspace and they may not have the sufficient structure to respond to the changing environments. In addition, adding actuators and sensors to the robot consider all possible failures, environment types and targeted goals may have drawbacks on both costs and complexity. Modular robot systems consist individual robotic agents, which have the capability of assembly and forming new structures. Robotic structures with conventional morphologies usually have more complicated structures compared to the modular robot systems. The modular robotic systems, having simpler structures, can adapt to different tasks, avoid obstacles, reconfigure as a structure and repair malfunctioned agents. Simplest designs have only one degree of freedom whilst it can go up to four or five degrees of freedom in systems that are more complicated. Recent studies brought up systems with different capabilities such as; self-assembly, self-reconfigurability, autonomy, mobility. However, most of the systems do not have all of these capabilities at once and the ones that have these abilities are not mobile enough to achieve locomotion sufficiently on rough and smooth terrain. In this work, a chain type self-assembly, modular self-reconfigurable robot system called ULGEN (Universal-Generative Robot) is designed and manufactured with wireless communication, localization, obstacle detection and high mobility capabilities. Presented work is a five degree of freedom system with six docking interfaces. This design configuration of the robot makes a single module adapt to different tasks, avoid obstacles and reconfigure as a structure. A single module can achieve locomotion in crawler mode and differential drive mode on its wheels. The rotating central joint brings up different capabilities, such as –(1) recovering itself if the module falls on its side and changing the locomotion type without reconfiguring the whole structure and (2) skid-steering to 4-wheel steering or insect-like four-legged robot to mammal-like four-legged robot. Localization can be used in swarm robotics applications. Modules can travel autonomously to explore ares individually and form an alternative configuration if they encounter obstacles. Once the optimal path is found or the defined target is found, the whole system can re-assemble and follow that path. All of the docking interfaces are compatible with each other and only the wheel connections require constant power supply to establish a rigid connection.