Docking Experiments of a Modular Robot by Visual Feedback

Abstract

We have been developing a self-reconfigurable robot M-TRAN. In this paper, we focus on the docking of M-TRAN modules. In order to dock modules in separate configurations, we use a camera module, which is compatible to the M-TRAN system. Proposed docking is a combination of a simple visual feedback procedure and a special docking configuration to absorb positional errors. We verified reliability of the docking method by experiments