Reconfiguration planning for wheel-manipulator robots

This paper presents a reconfiguration planning method for a mobile type modular reconfigurable robot system, which is composed of wheel-manipulator robots. The wheel-manipulator robots can either locomote autonomously as individual modules or assemble into various group configurations with different locomotion capabilities. Through reconfiguration, they are capable of adapting to different tasks or environments. Given a goal configuration, a reconfiguration is realized by the movement of the individual modules. The main difficulty of the reconfiguration planning problem is that the goals in the goal configuration for the respective modules are unknown, which are required for the motion planning of the modules. The proposed method is composed of three parts. Firstly, the transition states of the involved modules of a configuration are defined, based on which the reconfiguration process is decomposed into three steps. Secondly, the goals for the respective modules are determined by solving an assignment problem. Thirdly, the motions of the modules are generated, which take the kinematics of the robots into account and are collision-free. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility and the efficiency of the method.