The design of a representation and analysis method for modular self-reconfigurable robots

For Modular Self-Reconfigurable (MSR) robots to successfully reconfigure themselves, the control system must have the robot's topological structure before, during and after the reconfiguration process. Therefore, the module's docking status such as the docking orientation and the availability of docking ports must be ascertained before self-configuration takes place. This paper presents a representation method, based on labelled planar graphs and incidence matrices to represent the topologic structure of a group of connected modules. Essential information such as the orientations of the docked joints and docking ports are obtained from the labelled graph for reconfiguration. An innovative Hardware Orientation Detecting System (HODS) is proposed for detecting the orientation between two docking ports, which can be applied to all multi-orientation docking systems. An analytical method is also presented to determine whether a structure has enough degrees-of-freedom to perform self-reconfiguration.