Study on control system architecture of modular robot

Abstract

Modular, self-reconfigurable robots are showing the promise of robustness, great versatility and low cost. Based on the unique characters of reconfigurable robot, modular mechanical and electrical structure and control method are discussed in detail. Innovative control system architecture of modular and reconfigurable robot is presented in this paper. The hybrid control architecture is composed of the centralized supervisory controller and distributed module controllers. The centralized controller is implemented on Motorola PowerPC using RT-Linux Operating system and each module controller is implemented on DSP real time processor. The proposed architecture has been implemented on a modular mobile robot with an arm manipulator, and the results show validity and expandability of our proposed control architecture.