A preliminary study for reconfigurable robot system

In order to expand the scope of robot application, the robot should cope with the divergence of the assigned tasks and surrounding environments. With the conventional type of robot, however, the scope of the application is limited due to the lack of its reconfigurability. The authors, therefore, propose to realize a novel robot called reconfigurable robot, which is capable of changing its structure adaptively to the situation and the given tasks. The fundamental features of the robot are introduced and problems to be solved for its realization are described in this paper.