Modular robotics: design and examples

An object-oriented modular approach to the engineering of complex robotic systems emphasizes reliability, reusability, ease of development, and user and network interfaces. This modular approach integrates many architectural principles and computational techniques which support adaptive and learning capability at the local, modular level. The TETROBOT is a modular and reconfigurable robotic system which was developed to demonstrate the reliable performance in a wide variety of task domains through reconfiguration of the same fundamental hardware and software components. Such a modular approach emphasizes the synthesis and integration of engineering modules and takes advantage of object-oriented engineering principles to design for a family of tasks. This paper provides an overview of the TETROBOT modular system and describes three modular systems in other applications domains.