Highly compliant and self-tightening docking modules for precise and fast connection of self-reconfigurable robots

This paper describes a new docking system, called Compliant-And-Self-Tightening (CAST), developed as an effective and efficient connector for joining and releasing modules of self-reconfigurable or metamorphic robotic systems. CAST has been successfully implemented in CONRO where its highly compliant and passive features have allowed a considerable ease of execution of a variety of docking algorithms, while using no additional energy for docking and negligible amount of energy for undocking. Development of CAST was motivated by observing the difficulty of implementation of an earlier less compliant docking system designed by the authors for CONRO.