Automatic kinematic modelling of a modular reconfigurable robot

This paper focuses on the automatic generation of forward kinematics of a kind of modular reconfigurable robot. Based on the modularized division of robots and the communication between the host and the modules, a configuration recognition method is proposed. By using the graph theory, the method of topological analysis is proposed, and the assembly incidence matrix (AIM) and path matrix are derived. Subsequently, based on the results of topological analysis and the definition of module frames, the initial poses and twists of a robot are obtained. To deal with the multi-chain robots, the entries of the path matrix are employed to enable dyads to appear or not to appear in the kinematic equations. Then, the forward kinematics of the multi-chain robot is derived. An illustrative example and an experiment are presented. The results show that the method is valid and suitable for both single-open-chain robots and multi-chain robots.