This paper proposes to design a heterogeneous modular mobile robot control system based on the principle of full functionality of the modules. The full functionality of a mechatronic device is the ability to perform its goal function using only its own facilities for executing instructions from an external control system. The external control system is a module-supervisor of modular robot in relation to the other modules of the robot. This module forms the control goal and verifies only the result of its achievement by executive module, but doesn't control the task execution process by the module. The full functionality of robot modules is achieved by designing each module as a full-featured electronic or mechatronic device with its own the information-measuring and control system that containing all necessary components: sensors, computing devices and actuators. The use of a network principle of the robot's information-measuring and control system construction and the Ethernet standards provides the capability of direct inter-module information interaction and the ability to rapidly form and alter the structure of the robot directly on the scene of the works and during the works themselves.

We consider the modular principle for the construction of functional units of mobile robots. The main ideas of this concept and the general structure of the heterogeneous robot are presented. Basic functions of the robot are used to determine the minimum set of functional modules. For one of the simple configurations of the modular robot (the service mobile robot), we develop a motion module that is one of the main modules of the mobile robot. We present the design of this motion module and the result of a mathematical model of its control system. The control system combines the tactical level (for the construction of motion sub-targets and intermediate trajectories) and the executive level. The executive level of control system is based on kinematic and dynamic models of the modular robot. Working efficiency of the modular robot's model was tested on different motion tasks.

This paper presents a novel method for motion realization of differential drive mobile robot along a complex trajectory using two-dimensional vector fields (artificial forces). The method allows robot to move along trajectories that similar to B-splines without their preparatory computation. This is performed by using the given sequence of points (intermediate goal points) and manipulation of vector fields that defined by Gaussian functions. The feature of the method realization is as follows in its application in the transport module of a heterogeneous modular mobile robot which modules are functionally complete electronic or mechatronic devices. A functional completeness in this case means that every module must perform the function that built in its engineering implementation and control system by itself. The transport module realizes its functions upon receipt control goals (parameters of position vector) from module-supervisor that is part of modular mobile robot. In this case the transport module computes motion trajectory independently. Therefore a method of information interaction between the transport module and a module-supervisor is considered in this paper. The transport module performance under control of a module-supervisor is viewed by the example of mobile robotics typical tasks: motion in a known and unknown environment.

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In this paper we investigate a common issues associated with growth of computational complexity of mobile robots navigation algorithms. It is also shown that a realization of a particular robot application is usually slowed down because of lack of interchangeable and unified robot components. We propose a hierarchical modular architecture for reconfigurable mobile robots as a solution to these problems. In this architecture a mobile robot considered as a combination of modules, which in turn consist of more simple units -sub-modules. Each submodule incorporates a low performance microcontroller and is responsible for only basic functions. A set of sub-modules are then combined into a moduletransport platform, robot leg, arm etc. Besides of this one of the main goals of the study is to provide a framework based on this architecture for a rapid robot prototyping with modules that can be assembled in a plug-and-play way. In this paper we mostly consider hardware modules and prototypes that have been already manufactured. We also briefly investigate a robot transport module structure for a motion on a rough terrain in an unstructured environment.