A Modularized Personal Robot DRP I: Design and Implementation

In this paper, we investigate comprehensive issues of modularized robot systems and present architecture for effective development of personal robots. The proposed architecture includes the interface and interaction methodology of the hardware modules and the software among the modules. Based on the architecture, we present a fully modularized personal robot dynamically reconfigurable personal robot I. Its hardware modules are easily added to or removed from the original system, and also the distributed software functions of the modules are rearrangeable accordingly. We focus on how to effectively build up the robot, and discuss the dynamically reconfigurable features of it for evaluating the proposed idea and approach.