Connection Mechanism for Autonomous Self-Assembly in Mobile Robots

This paper presents a connection mechanism for autonomous self-assembly in mobile robots. Using this connection mechanism, mobile robots can be autonomously connected and disconnected. The purpose of self-assembly in mobile robotics is to add a new capability to mobile robots, thus, improving their performance to best fit the terrain conditions. Construction of a reconnectable joint is of primary concern in such systems. In this paper, first the geometric conditions and force equations of a general docking mechanism are studied. Then, we discuss the design details of our connection mechanism and present some experimental results that show that the proposed mechanism overcomes significant alignment errors and is considerably power efficient.