A New Distributed Control Scheme of Modular and Reconfigurable Robots

For modular and reconfigurable robots, it is very difficult to design effective controllers due to diverse configurations. Thus, a new distributed control scheme is proposed in this paper to satisfy the concept of modular software. Based on geometric formulation for the dynamics of rigid body, a robot dynamics system is divided into some subsystems by a decomposing algorithm, and then a sliding mode controller with an adaptive scheme, is designed for each subsystem to avoid uncertainty during decomposition. These subsystem controllers together constitute a modular control network to achieve stable and reliable motion of a modular and reconfigurable robot. Finally, simulation results show the validity of the decomposing algorithm and proposed sliding mode controller.