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Modular reconfigurable robots offer the promise of more versatility, robustness, and low cost. They are composed of simple and small modules, capable of attach and detach one to each other. In this paper, a modular worm-like robot composed of a chain of 8 similar modules is presented. A travelling wave, that moves from the tail to the head, propels the robot forward. The positions of the articulations are calculated using the following parameters: waveform, amplitude, and wavelength. Instead of a conventional architecture, a FPGA-based softprocessor core is utilized. It includes a set of custom peripheral cores, written in VHDL. FPGAs make modular robots more versatile, adding some new featureas to the design of robots like reconfigurable control, hardware reuse, lower cost, fault-recovering, and software/hardware co-design.

Esta es la versión de autor de la comunicación de congreso publicada en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: AbstractComplex modular robots can be constructed by means of simple modules. There is no geometric superior size to the total number of modules that can be added. The number of possible configurations growth exponentially. However, an inferior limit exists: the minimum number of modules needed to achieve the locomotion. In this paper, three minimal configurations has been developed using only two and three one-degree-of-freedom modules. The simplest one is pitch-pitch configuration, composed of two modules, which can move in a straight line, forward or backward, at different speeds. The second one is the pitch-yaw-pitch , with one more module that moves in the yaw axis. In this case, three new kinds of motion can be achieved: 2D sinusoidal motion, lateral shift and lateral rolling. Finally, the third configuration is a three-modules star, that can be moved in three directions as well as rotated parallel to the ground.

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