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ICRA
2008
IEEE

Anatomy-based organization of modular robots

13 years 10 months ago
Anatomy-based organization of modular robots
Abstract— This paper presents a novel biologicallyinspired hierarchical approach to organizing and controlling modular robots. The purpose of our approach is to decompose the complexity of assembling and commanding a functional robot made of numerous simple modules (thousands to millions) by introducing a hierarchy of structure and control. The robots we describe incorporate anatomically-inspired parts such as muscles, bones and joints, and these parts in turn are assembled from modules. Each of those parts encapsulates one or more functions, e.g. a muscle can contract. Control of the robot can then be cast as a problem of controlling its anatomical parts rather than each discrete module. We show simulation results from experiments using gradient-based primitives to control parts of increasingly complex robots, including snake, crawler, cilia-surface, armjoint-muscle and grasping robots. We conclude that this approach is promising for future many-modules systems, but is currently imp...
David Johan Christensen, Jason Campbell
Added 30 May 2010
Updated 30 May 2010
Type Conference
Year 2008
Where ICRA
Authors David Johan Christensen, Jason Campbell
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