Design, Build, and Test of Modular Mobile Micro Robots

Abstract

This paper presents a novel architecture for a mobile micro robot design. The architecture will have hardware and software modularity. The modular architecture of the platform provides “plug-and-play” capability that will allow hardware and software subsystems to be easily swapped. This paper focuses on vertical hardware modularity in the sense that modules will not be identical to each other but have common connectivity. Our approach slices a robot into functional modules such as locomotion, control, sensors, communication, and actuation. Any mobile robot can be constructed by combining the above abstract modules. A sub-module is a piece of hardware, which accomplishes the functionality of an abstract module, i.e. a wireless communication sub-module for a communication module. The software architecture consists of abstract classes and their objects. The abstract classes are “robot”, “locomotion”, “control”, “communication”, “sensor”, and “actuators”. From these abstract classes, concrete classes are derived. The objects are going to be created from the concrete classes. For example, “wireless” can be a class inherited from “communication” class. Then, an instance of “wireless” class can be created as the communication module in the robot. The objects (tasks) are dynamically loaded into the robots so that the modular OS can run the tasks on the sub-module it has. The paper explores generations of micro robot designs with modular architecture.