Research on kinematics of modular reconfigurable robots

This paper mainly focuses on the kinematics of multi-branch modular reconfigurable robots. A method of generating the forward kinematics is proposed. Firstly, the robot is divided into joints and links, which are formed dyads subsequently. Secondly, module frames are defined and attached to each connector of modules. Thirdly, based on screw theory and Lie group and Lie algebra, the initial poses and twists of a multi-branch robot are obtained, and the kinematic equations of the robot are derived. An illustrative example and an experiment are implemented, respectively, and the results show that the method is valid and suitable for both single-open-chain robots and multi-branch robots.