Feng, ShuminLiu, YujiongPressgrove, IsaacBen-Tzvi, Pinhas2024-05-242024-05-242024-05-20Feng, S.; Liu, Y.; Pressgrove, I.; Ben-Tzvi, P. Autonomous Alignment and Docking Control for a Self-Reconfigurable Modular Mobile Robotic System. Robotics 2024, 13, 81.https://hdl.handle.net/10919/119091This paper presents the path planning and motion control of a self-reconfigurable mobile robot system, focusing on module-to-module autonomous docking and alignment tasks. STORM, which stands for Self-configurable and Transformable Omni-Directional Robotic Modules, features a unique mode-switching ability and novel docking mechanism design. This enables the modules that make up STORM to dock with each other and form a variety configurations in or to perform a large array of tasks. The path planning and motion control presented here consists of two parallel schemes. A Lyapunov function-based precision controller is proposed to align the target docking mechanisms in a small range of the target position. Then, an optimization-based path planning algorithm is proposed to help find the fastest path and determine when to switch its locomotion mode in a much larger range. Both numerical simulations and real-world experiments were carried out to validate these proposed controllers.application/pdfenCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 Internationalmodular self-reconfigurable robotic systemmobile robot stabilizationswitching kinematicstrajectory optimizationArticle - Refereed2024-05-24https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics13050081