Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ROBOTICS RESEARCH
Volume 27, Issue 3-4, Pages 445-462Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/0278364907085562
Keywords
cellular and modular robots; distributed robot systems; mechanism design; path planning for multiple mobile; robot systems; autonomous agents; robotics in construction
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Construction is difficult to automate because of its complexity. Introducing modularity into both structural components and a means of assembly solves the problem by simplifying the construction task. Based on this idea, we propose a novel concept of a fully automated construction system called the Automatic Modular Assembly System (AMAS). In this paper, we discuss the hardware system and distributed control method of AMAS. This system uses passive building blocks called structure modules and an assembler robot that is specialized to handle them. This modular concept drastically simplifies structural complexity. We have built a prototype model to evaluate its automatic construction capability. Then we introduce a distributed autonomous control for AMAS, which uses a gradient field to indicate the directions to the assembler robots. The gradient field is generated on the structure modules. To improve the efficiency, we introduce collision avoidance rules such as module relay and local negotiation via a blackboard. We also evaluate the overall performance of the distributed control with simulations.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available