Locomotion Principles of 1D Topology Pitch and Pitch-Yaw-Connecting Modular Robots

摘要

The Locomotion principles for the groups of pitch-pitch connection and pitch-yawconnecting modular robots have been studied, simulated and finally tested on real robots. Five different gaits have been achieved: 1D sinusoidal, rolling, rotating, turning and side winding. The rotating gait is a new one not previously mentioned by other researchers to the best of our knowledge. All the gaits have been implemented using a biologically inspired model based on sinusoidal generators that can be implemented efficiently on low cost microcontrollers. The minimal configurations for both locomotion in 1D and 2D have been found. They are novel configurations that minimize the number of modules and therefore maximize the number of robots in which a self-reconfigurable robot can split into. Finally a complete new simulation environment for 1D topologies robots has been developed and used to collect all the data needed for the study of the locomotion principles.