Design of reconfigurable heterogeneous modular architecture for service robots

This paper presents the design and implementation of a reconfigurable heterogeneous modular architecture for service robots. The proposed architecture has five key concepts which are different from conventional reconfigurable modular service robots; (1) easy and multiple assembly according to requirements of users, (2) hardware resource sharing system with other heterogeneous modules, (3) communication ability among all heterogeneous modules which have different operating systems, (4) automatic connection management system when a new module is attached, (5) automatic software upgrading system for new module software. We explain the three parts of the system architecture which meet the five concepts; mechanical architecture, software architecture, and connection architecture. To verify our architecture, we developed and evaluated a reconfigurable heterogeneous modular service robot by applying the proposed design.