Design and Realization of Control System for Reconfigurable Multi-segment Robot

Multi-segment robot's adaptation to rough terrain is much better than traditional single robot, because of the force cooperation between segments. One kind of multi-segment robot can undock to modules, which have the ability of locomotion and perform some simple tasks. JL-1 robot is one of this kind of robots. The most notable characteristics of this robot are module-based and reconfigurable, which require the control system of this robot to meet some special tasks. In this paper, we propose a distributed control system with two levels of hardware controllers and module hierarchical software architecture to fulfill the demands of information sharing, force cooperation and non-contradictive velocity control. Furthermore, the results of experiment are shown to demonstrate its performance.