Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kamimura, A.
• Kurokawa, H.
• Yoshida, E.
• Murata, S.
• Tomita, K.
• Kokaji, S.

Titel

Automatic locomotion design and experiments for a Modular robotic system

Ist Teil von

• IEEE/ASME transactions on mechatronics, 2005-06, Vol.10 (3), p.314-325

Ort / Verlag

New York: IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Quelle

IEEE/IET Electronic Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This paper presents a design method and experiments for whole-body locomotion by a modular robot. There are two types of locomotion for modular robots: a repeating self-reconfiguration and whole-body motion such as walking or crawling. For whole-body locomotion, designing a control method is more difficult than for ordinary robots because a modular robotic system can form various configurations, each of which has many degrees of freedom. This study proposes a unified framework for automatically designing an efficient locomotion controller suitable for any module configuration. The method utilizes neural oscillators (central pattern generators, CPGs), each of which works as a distributed joint controller of each module, and a genetic algorithm to optimize the CPG network. We verified the method by software simulations and hardware experiments, in which our modular robotic system, named M-TRAN II, performed stable and effective locomotion in various configurations.