Paper Info
Title
An experimental study on the role of compliant elements on the locomotion of the self-reconfigurable modular robots Roombots
Abstract
This paper presents the results of a study on the exploitation of compliance in structures made of self-reconfigurable modular robots - Roombots. This research was driven by the following three hypotheses: (1) compliance can improve locomotion performance; (2) different types of compliance will result in diverse locomotion behaviors; (3) control parameters optimized for a medium level of compliance will perform better for other values of compliance than parameters optimized for extremal compliance. Two types of in-series compliant elements were tested, with five different stiffness values for each of them, on a structure made of two Roombots modules. We ran dedicated on-line locomotion parameter optimizations for six different configurations and evaluated their performance for different stiffness values. Hypothesis 1 was confirmed for both types of compliant elements, with a peak of performance for an optimal level of compliance. The variety of locomotion strategies obtained for the different structures confirms hypothesis 2. Hypothesis 3 was only partially confirmed.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/IROS.2013.6696974
Intelligent Robots and Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
elasticity,mobile robots,motion control,multi-robot systems,optimisation,robot dynamics,compliant elements,dedicated on-line locomotion parameter optimizations,extremal compliance,in-series compliant elements,locomotion behaviors,locomotion performance,optimized control parameters,roombots,self-reconfigurable modular robot locomotion,stiffness values
Robot control,Motion control,Simulation,Stiffness,Computer science,Control engineering,Robot locomotion,Self-reconfiguring modular robot,Mobile robot
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2153-0858
1
0.40
References 
Authors
3
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Massimo Vespignani113911.02
Senft, E.210.40
Bonardi, S.310.40
Moeckel, R.410.40