Fault- Tolerance Mechanism for Self-Reconfiguration of Modular Robots

Abstract

A Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robot (MSR) is an Internet of Robotic Things object (IoRT) composed of an ensemble of independent communicating robotic modules that can self-reconfigure to change their initial shape into a goal one. Self-reconfiguration is known to be an intricate and complex task and faults such as broken connections, loss of power, incomplete motions … are likely to occur during the self-reconfiguration process. However, existing work on self-reconfiguration considers fault-free robotic modules and does not apply any fault-tolerance mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerance mechanism that can be applied to a broken interface which results in communication failures in the context of the self-reconfiguration of a 3D Catom robot using the deterministic scaffold assembly algorithm. We introduce a new module role: the Helper module. The Helper module serves as a communication bridge between two modules attached by a broken interface. We showed in simulation the efficiency of our approach dealing with communication failures caused by broken interfaces.