Distributed computation of dynamics in reconfigurable robotics

A distributed computation algorithm based on the virtual force method supports the computation of dynamic redundancy resolution for modular reconfigurable robotic systems. Such systems have many redundant degrees of freedom in order to meet the combined demands of strength, rigidity, workspace kinematics, reconfigurability, and fault tolerance. An efficient distributed computational scheme computes the kinematics, dynamics, and redundancy resolution for real-time application to the control of these systems. A potential function which depends only on the local information of adjacent nodes of the structure is introduced and applied to the Tetrobot modular reconfigurable system. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed distributed algorithms, and these results are compared to the centralized Jacobian method which requires global information.