Automatic onboard and online modelling of modular and self-reconfigurable robots

In this paper, we introduce a framework for automatic generation of dynamic equations for modular and reconfigurable robotic systems. The framework is developed in C++ and is capable to deal with both symbolic and numerical type of variables. For this reason, the model for kinematics and dynamics can either be formulated symbolically with high precisions or numerically if the computing time is for major interest. These capabilities makes it powerful for many different scientific and practical applications. The framework was first developed and evaluated in MATLAB and has been finally ported to modular robots running on an embedded processor. Different multi robot configurations have been evaluated and compared with simulation results.