Wh. Lee et Ac. Sanderson, Dynamic analysis and distributed control of the tetrobot modular reconfigurable robotic system, AUTON ROBOT, 10(1), 2001, pp. 67-82
Reconfigurable robotic systems can be adapted to different tasks or environ
ments by reorganizing their mechanical configurations. Such systems have ma
ny redundant degrees of freedom in order to meet the combined demands of st
rength, rigidity, workspace kinematics, reconfigurability, and fault tolera
nce. In order to implement these new generations of robotic system, new app
roaches must be considered for design, analysis, and control. This paper pr
esents an efficient distributed computational scheme which computes the kin
ematics, dynamics, redundancy resolution, and control inputs for real-time
application to the control of the Tetrobot modular reconfigurable robots. T
he entire system is decomposed into subsystems based on a modular approach
and Newton's equations of motion are derived and implemented using a recurs
ive propagation algorithm. Two different dynamic resolution of redundancy s
chemes, the centralized Jacobian method and the distributed virtual force m
ethod, are proposed to optimize the actuating forces. Finally, distributed
dynamic control algorithms provide an efficient modular implementation of t
he control architecture for a large family of configurations.