A substructure based motion planning method for a modular self-reconfigurable robot

In this paper we propose the concept of a single rotation DOF cubic module structure of a novel 3D homogenous lattice modular self-reconfigurable robot. We design a hierarchical motion planning method based on a cubic substructure which is constructed by eight modules, the upper level uses the total potential method to decide the global path of the substructure, the low level includes a build-in planning database for every module. Besides, a simulation experiment proves that this method could reduce the search space of the planning and has less complexity with higher efficiency, and it is feasible in the motion planning of a cluster chain structure of modules.