Designing a modular robotic architecture for industrial applications

Abstract

This paper considers the issue of increasing the number of robots working in sectors characterized by dynamic and unstructured environments. Specifically, the paper deals with a new approach, based on modular robotics, to allow the fast deployment of robots to solve specific tasks. Some authors have proposed modular architectures, mostly in laboratory settings, but their design was usually based and what could be built instead of what was necessary for industrial operations. Here we consider the problem by defining the industrial settings the architecture is aimed at and extract the main features that would be required from a modular robotic architecture to operate successfully in these kinds of environments. These requirements are then taken into account to design a particular heterogeneous modular robotic architecture and a laboratory implementation of it is built in order to test its capabilities and show its versatility using a set of different configurations including manipulators, climbers and walkers.