Design of a Reconfigurable Robot with Size-Adaptive Path Planner

Abstract

Area coverage is demanded from the robots utilized in application domains such as floor cleaning. Even though many advanced coverage algorithms have been developed, the area coverage performance is limited due to the inaccessibility of narrow spaces caused by physical constraints. Reconfigurable robots have been introduced to overcome this limitation where reconfigurability could help in assessing narrow spaces. Nevertheless, the state-of-the-art reconfigurable robots are not capable of changing the morphology size and shape as a single entity. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel design of a reconfigurable robot with a size-adaptive coverage strategy. The reconfiguration mechanism is designed in such a way that the robot can independently expand or shrink its size along the principal planar axes, where the behavior allows the change of size and shape. The coverage strategy is based on boustrophedon motion and the A* algorithm modified for accessing narrow areas using the size adaptability. The design of the robot is detailed in the paper, including electro-mechanical aspects, design considerations, and the coverage path planning method. Experiments have been conducted using a prototype of the proposed design to analyze and evaluate the characteristics and the performance of the robot. The results show that the proposed robot design can improve the productivity of a floor cleaning robot in terms of area coverage and coverage time.