Design of Modular Robots and reconfiguration exercises using Lego bricks

This paper presents design of Reconfigurable Modular Robots (RMRs) with four contact surfaces and a central controller for monitoring and controlling re-configuration through docking and undocking. The body of the RMR is completely built using Lego bricks which makes the prototyping rapid. In addition, it helps realizing feasibility of the design at the earliest stage of the project. The RMR has two main parts: body (head) and a tail. The tail is designed as a two dof manipulator with a docking surface which differentiates itself from other RMRs available in the literature. Three more docking surfaces on body together have four surfaces in total. The motion control the robot, joint control of the tail and data acquisition from sensors are managed by Arduino. NodeMCU links the communication between the central controller and Arduino and make the system IoT capable. Reconfiguration is done through docking between the robots and is implemented using a simple path planning algorithm based on reference vector calculations. Image processing was used to real-time identification of robots and estimation of poses. A central controller is designed using MatLab GUI for overall control and monitoring of the RMRs. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated for the snake-configuration and was found successful in achieving desired configuration.