Mathematical foundation for hormone-inspired control for self-reconfigurable robotic systems

In this paper, we present a general mathematical foundation of hormone-inspired control for the self-reconfigurable robotic system. Problem considered here is the lack of a mathematical description to analyze and explain the dynamic behavior of self-reconfigurable robots. In the global level, the idea of virtual disconnection is developed to abstract the low level module control away from the high level synchronization for both cyclic and acyclic robot configuration. In the module layer, the linear space model is developed to describe each module's internal state, input-output hormone transformation, and its action selection. As a combination of hormone and modern control theory, the approach in this paper gives more features, such as predictability and stability analysis etc, to hormone-inspired control, and makes it applicable to self-reconfigurable systems in general. Simulation and experimental results show the capacity of our method.