Abstract
We are interested in the next generation of industrial robots, those that are able to operate in dynamic and unstructured environments and, consequently, that are able to adapt to changing circumstances or to work on different tasks in an autonomous way. In this sense, multirobot systems and, in particular, modular systems present several features like scalability, fault tolerance, low maintenance or reconfiguration capabilities that make them highly suitable for this kind of environments. The work presented here is concerned with the problem of automatically obtaining the morphology and control structure for this type of modular systems. In this line, we present the first results produced using a newly designed constructive evolutionary approach that takes into account the extreme difficulty of the tremendously deceptive and uninformative search space this type of applications are faced with. As an example, the algorithm is used to design the morphology and the distributed control parameters for a typical benchmark problem, that of moving as far as possible in a straight line, for a heterogeneous modular robotic system developed by our group.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Ortiz, F., Pastor, J., Alvarez, B., Iborra, A., Ortega, N., Rodriguez, D., Concsa, C.: Robots for hull ship cleaning. In: IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics, pp. 2077–2082 (2007)
Lee, D., Lee, S., Ku, N., Lim, C., Lee, K., Kim, T., Kim, J.: Development and Application of a Novel Rail Runner Mechanism for Double Hull Structures of Ships. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 3985–3991 (2008)
Duro, R., Graña, M., de Lope, J.: On the potential contributions of hybrid intelligent approaches to Multicomponent Robotic System development. Information Sciences 180, 2635–2648 (2010)
Yim, M., Duff, D., Roufas, K.: PolyBot: a modular reconfigurable robot. In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 514–520 (2000)
Murata, S., Yoshida, E., Kamimura, A., Kurokawa, H., Tomita, K., Kokaji, S.: M-TRAN: Self-reconfigurable modular robotic system. IEEE/ASME transactions on mechatronics 7, 431–441 (2002)
Castano, A., Behar, A., Will, P.M.: The Conro modules for reconfigurable robots. IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics 7, 403–409 (2002)
Ranasinghe, N., Everist, J., Shen, W.M.: Modular Robot Climbers. In: Proc. 2007 IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conf. Intelligent Robots Systems (2007)
Salemi, B., Moll, M., Shen, W.: SUPERBOT: A deployable, multi-functional, and modular self-reconfigurable robotic system. In: Proc. 2006 IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conf. Intelligent Robots Systems, pp. 3636–3641 (2006)
Macinnes, I., Di Paolo, E.: Crawling out of the simulation: Evolving real robot morphologies using cheap, reusable modules. In: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Artificial Life, pp. 94–99 (2004)
Farritor, S., Dubowsky, S., Rutman, N.: On the design of rapidly deployable field robotic systems. In: ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference (1996)
Caamano, P., Tedin, R., Paz-Lopez, A., Becerra, J.A.: JEAF: A Java Evolutionary Algorithm Framework. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, 1–8 (2010)
Brandt, D., Christensen, D.J., Lund, H.H.: ATRON Robots: Versatility from Self-Reconfigurable Modules. In: Conference on Mechatronics and Automation, pp. 26–32 (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Faíña, A., Bellas, F., Souto, D., Duro, R.J. (2011). Towards an Evolutionary Design of Modular Robots for Industry. In: Ferrández, J.M., Álvarez Sánchez, J.R., de la Paz, F., Toledo, F.J. (eds) Foundations on Natural and Artificial Computation. IWINAC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6686. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21344-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21344-1_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21343-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21344-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)