A Configuration Design Method for Reconfigurable Robots Based on Terrain Understanding

Abstract

Reconfigurable robots have excellent reconfigurability and environmental adaptability, but the configuration design method to select appropriate configuration with different environments has not been fully studied. Most of the existing work is based on the known global environment information, or only focus on the structure design. How to effectively obtain rich terrain information for subsequent configuration design is the subject of this paper. In our work, a comprehensive method of obtaining robotic configuration is proposed which considering geometric information and semantic information of unstructured terrain. And it provides new possibilities for reconfigurable robots to perform autonomous tasks in complex scenarios. Results of simulation experiments prove the availability of the mentioned method.