Design of iMobot, an intelligent reconfigurable mobile robot with novel locomotion

The design and novel features of a reconfigurable modular robot, called iMobot, with four controllable degrees of freedom is presented in this paper. iMobot, which is designed for search and rescue operations as well as other applications such as research and teaching, has versatile locomotion, including a unique feature of driving as though with wheels and lifting itself into a camera platform. Future work is envisioned for using these modules in clusters to achieve advanced mobility. The accompanying video demonstrates the various locomotion of the modular robot.

[1]  Hod Lipson,et al.  Evolutionary Robotics for Legged Machines: From Simulation to Physical Reality , 2006, IAS.

[2]  Harry H. Cheng,et al.  Novel locomotion of iMobot, an intelligent reconfigurable mobile robot , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[3]  Eiichi Yoshida,et al.  A Self-Reconfigurable Modular Robot: Reconfiguration Planning and Experiments , 2002 .

[4]  Eiichi Yoshida,et al.  A Self-Reconfigurable Modular Robot , 2002, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[5]  Wei-Min Shen,et al.  Using role-based control to produce locomotion in chain-type self-reconfigurable robots , 2002 .

[6]  Mark Yim,et al.  Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robots , 2009, Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science.

[7]  Wei-Min Shen,et al.  Multimode locomotion via SuperBot reconfigurable robots , 2006, Auton. Robots.

[8]  Ying Zhang,et al.  Robotics for Future Land Warfare : Modular Self Reconfigurable Robots , 2002 .

[9]  Ying Zhang,et al.  Scalable and reconfigurable configurations and locomotion gaits for chain-type modular reconfigurable robots , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation. Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation for the New Millennium (Cat. No.03EX694).

[10]  Henrik Hautop Lund,et al.  Modular ATRON: modules for a self-reconfigurable robot , 2004, 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37566).

[11]  Hiroshi Yokoi,et al.  Robotics in Education: Plastic Bottle Based Robots for Understanding Morph-Functionality , 2006, ROMAN 2006 - The 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.