らせん状磁石による結合・変形機構を備えたモジュラーロボットの開発

This paper presents a robot partner development platform based on smart devices. Humans communicate with others based on the basic motivations of human cooperation and have communicative motives based on social attributes. Understanding and applying these communicative motives become important in the development of socially-embedded robot partners. Therefore, it is becoming more important to develop robots that can be applied according to needs while taking these human communication elements into consideration. The role of a robot partner is more important in not only on the industrial sector but also in households. However, it seems that it will take time to disseminate robots. In the field of service robots, the development of robots according to various needs is important and the system integration of hardware and software becomes crucial. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a robot partner development platform for human-robot interaction. Firstly, we propose a modularized architecture of robot partners using a smart device to realize a flexible update based on the re-usability of hardware and software modules. In addition, we show examples of implementing a robot system using the proposed architecture. Next, we focus on the development of various robots using the modular robot partner system. Finally, we discuss the effectiveness of the proposed robot partner system through social implementation and experiments.

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) now provide mature optimization tools that have successfully been applied to many problems, from designing antennas to complete robots, and already provided many human-competitive results. In robotics, the integration of EAs within the engineer's toolbox made tremendous progress in the last 20 years and new methods are now available to address challenging problems in various setups: modular robotics, swarm robotics, robotics with non-conventional mechanics (e.g. high redundancy, dynamic motion, multi-modality), etc. This book takes its roots in the workshop on New Horizons in Evolutionary Design of that brought together researchers from Computer Science and Robotics during the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS-2009) in Saint Louis (USA). This book features extended contributions from the workshop, thus providing various examples of current problems and applications, with a special emphasis on the link between Computer Science and Robotics. It also provides a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to Evolutionary Robotics after 20 years of maturation as well as thoughts and considerations from several major actors in the field. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the current trends and challenges in Evolutionary Robotics for the next decade.

Purpose – This article aims to provide details of recent developments in robots that can change shape and self-reconfigure. Design/methodology/approach – Following an introduction, this article first describes some recent developments in shape-changing materials and then considers a selection of shape-changing robots. It then discusses self-reconfiguring robots and describes a unique self-unfolding robot. Finally, concluding comments are drawn. Findings – This article shows that research into true shape-changing robots is still at an early stage and several very different strategies are being studied. Novel materials are expected to play a key role in many designs and potential applications include search and rescue, health care and surveillance. Self-reconfiguring modular robots are at a more advanced stage and while many can reconfigure to adopt varying shapes and gaits, the ability to accomplish differing tasks in manufacturing is still some way in the future. Overall, the various classes of shape-changing robots being studied represent a move towards a new era in robotic capabilities, but despite many recent technological advances, considerable further work is required before these become a practical reality. Originality/value – This article provides an insight into recent technological advances in shape-changing and self-reconfiguring robots.

After thirty years development, the service robots have achieved important results in the interdisciplinary aspect involving mechanical engineering, information, material, control as well as medicine. In combination with our relative research work in the field of service robots, in this paper, we review the research and development status of the service robotic technologies based on the analysis about the current development of the service robots at home and abroad. The key technologies include the biomimetic materials and structure for more efficient and compact design, the self-reconfiguring modular robots with more strong survival ability, the robotic dynamics under the complex environments, the intelligent cognitive and perception for more information, the networked interaction for more complex tasks, the micro-nano robotic systems used in tiny space and so on. Finally, we think that the dialectical relationships between the needs and the innovation, the industry, the service and the safety are the core driving and binding forces which will influence the development of the service robots significantly. We hope this paper will not only grasp the development trends of the international advanced service robots, but also provide related theory, method and technology for our country’s service robotic industry.

Our research perspective is to develop mechanisms for gathering information efficiently in disaster sites. Ideally this requires mechanisms with capabilities of flexible, on-site, adaptation of the overall shape and of the locomotion strategy to unknown and unstable environments. We have been developing three-legged modular robots which can be interconnected to cooperatively achieve multiple locomotion modes and collaboratively perform tasks that cannot be done by a single module. In this paper, we report the development of experimental modular robots and experimentations with their cooperative activities which evolve out of their various inter-connectivity options.

Evolutionary robotics using real hardware is currently restricted to evolving robot controllers, but the technology for evolvable morphologies is advancing quickly. Rapid prototyping (3D printing) and automated assembly are the main enablers of robotic systems where robot offspring can be produced based on a blueprint that specifies the morphologies and the controllers of the parents. This article addresses the problem of gait learning in newborn robots whose morphology is unknown in advance. We investigate a reinforcement learning method and conduct simulation experiments using robot morphologies with different size and complexity. We establish that reinforcement learning does the job well and that it outperforms two alternative algorithms. The experiments also give insights into the online dynamics of gait learning and into the influence of the size, shape, and morphological complexity of the modular robots. These insights can potentially be used to predict the viability of modular robotic organisms before they are constructed.

This paper surveys modular robot systems, which consist of multiple modules and aim to create versatile, robust, and low cost systems. The modularity allows these robots to self-assemble, self-reconfigure, self-repair, and self-replicate. Therefore, the surveyed research covered the previous characteristics along with evolutionary robotics and 3D printed robots. These fields are interdisciplinary, so we organize the implemented systems according to the main feature in each one. The primary motivation for this is to categorize modular robots according to their main function and to discover the similarities and differences of implementing each system.

The development of cooperative robots is reaching new heights in this decade. It helps in industries to improve the production rate, performance, efficiency, and robustness in a variety of tasks. The two modular robots combine to perform various applications like assembly, welding, and painting. The cooperative robot operation in assembly still exhibits in numerous open challenges, including the effective coordination of the robots. This article explains a novel control architecture to control two modular industrial robots with open and closed architecture controllers for screwing application. In this process, screwing operation is performed with MH5LS and GP12 industrial robots with two different controllers FS100 and YRC1000. A master controller is used to instruct the robots. The trajectory of the screwing is experimentally verified.

This paper presents a modular design scheme for miniature underwater robot used for swarm operations. Both the hardware circuit and the software structure are introduced. In this design, miniature underwater robots are composed of two kinds of modules, namely a core controller and a set of functional modules. The core controller is in charge of running the software that control the robot, while a functional module is an integration of both the hardware circuit and software to perform certain function. General connectors are used to connect a set of functional modules to the core controller, which accelerates the process of robot development. With this design scheme, two kinds of miniature underwater robots named Horseshoe Crab I and Horseshoe Crab II are developed for swarm operations, showing that this scheme can help develop miniature robot in short time and at low cost.

We present the architecture and design of a general purpose robotics development kit, called X10ABOT, which aims to facilitate the rapid development of robotic solutions to a wide variety of problems. Robotics kits of this sort are usually aimed at casual hobbyists and children, and as a result, usually have severe limitations in the number of sensors and actuators that they can manage. In contrast, X10ABOT is: modular (new functionality is added through standard daughter boards), scalable (up to 16 sensors and actuators on each of up to 112 hardware modules), and extensible (module software can be upgraded to support new types of sensors and actuators). We have also designed a generic port, capable of handling several types of sensors; and we have done similarly for the actuators. The system is still under active development, but we present preliminary results to show how the system would allow its user to readily add extra actuators to a creation, with minimal configuration information required, and relatively little impact on the preexisting user code.