Position-sensing based a new docking system of RPRS

Docking is an essential function for reconfigurable planetary robot system (RPRS), it supports almost all metamorphic characteristics of the system. This paper presents a space docking method for self-reconfigurable modular robot system. The method adopts a position sensory detector (PSD) to get the space geometrical relation between modular child robots. By using the kinematics and inverse kinematics modeling of the child robot, a docking control algorithm is developed to achieve space dock automatically. To validate the method, simulation experiments were done on a platform based on OPENGL, and the simulating results were given as well.