Control System of a Modular and Reconfigurable Multilegged Robot

Abstract

Comparing to other robot systems, the modular reconfigurable walking robot has good adaptability to complex terrain, high flexibility and high extensibility. A distributed hierarchical control system of a modular walking robot is proposed and the prototype is built in this paper. The control system is composed of a PC-based computer, a body-level controller and several base-level controllers. The expansive software architecture featuring three-level hierarchy is proposed and offers support to the modularity of the control system. By the simulation and experiments, it is proved that the robot has the walking, object packing and reconfigurable abilities, and each joint module has the plug and play function.