System Level Modeling and Control Design of hTetrakis–A Polyiamond Inspired Self-Reconfigurable Floor Tiling Robot

Fixed morphology cleaning robots mostly face significant challenges in cleaning the narrow spaces in the environment. To overcome this, a new class of self-reconfigurable floor cleaning robot, hTetrakis, made of four triangular blocks, is built. This paper focuses on the modeling and controller design of the locomotion and reconfiguration mechanism of the platform. The locomotion of the platform with respect to the velocity of the wheels is formulated based on the kinematic analysis. By modeling the system in Simscape multibody toolbox of Matlab, the maneuverability of the platform is studied. The reconfiguration of the platform is studied based on the dynamics of individual block about the hinged joint. The control architecture of this platform has two distinct Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers to eliminate the position error during reconfiguration, and to maintain the platform’s velocity. The coverage path planning of the platform is based on the classical Travelling Salesman Problem which finds the optimal sequence of waypoints as per the minimal energy consumption. Real time experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes in terms of eliminating the velocity errors, and maintaining the desired trajectory.