The Assemble and Animate Control Framework for Modular Reconfigurable Robots

Abstract

Abstract — This paper describes the “Assemble and Animate” (ASE) control framework. The objective of ASE is to provide a flexible and extendable control framework, which facilitates rapid development and deployment of modular reconfigurable robots. ASE includes a simple event-driven application framework, a library of common control and adaptation strategies, and a module abstraction layer which allows ASE to be cross-compiled for a number of different modular robotic platforms and easily ported to new platforms. In this paper we describe the design of ASE and present example applications utilizing ASE for planetary contingency, adaptive locomotion, self-reconfiguration, and tangible behavior-based programming. I.