High-level control of modular robots

Abstract

This paper discusses the creation of provably correct control for modular robots from high-level tasks expressed using sentences in structured English. Due to the nature of modular robots, we address problems that include requirements on the geometry and motion characteristics of the robot; these requirements are captured using traits in the specification that are then used in the control generation process. Outlined in this paper is our approach for generating all the lower levels of control for a modular robot given the high-level problem statement. The approach includes the use of a configuration-gait-trait library for characterizing modular robots and tools for populating this library such as a physics-based simulator and gait creator. The approach is demonstrated in simulation and with the CKBot hardware platform.