On-line kinematics reasoning for reconfigurable robot drives

The control system for a mobile robot typically assumes fixed kinematics according to the drive's geometry and functionality. Faults in the system, for example a blocked steering actuator, will then lead to an undesired behaviour, unless one takes care of specific single and/or multiple faults explicitly. We present a novel model-programmed procedure for on-line kinematics reasoning that allows a robot to deduce the (inverse)-kinematics of the drive and also its kinematic abilities for the specific modes of operation and some falt modes during operation. As a consequence, we can reconfigure a robot drive to compensate for some faults and also inform a higher level control system about changed mobility capabilities of a robot. Being fault tolerant is, however, only one advantage of our approach that derives the kinematics control strategy from a geometric and functional model of the drive. We can easily adapt the controller for various robot drives, handle drives that change their geometry and functionality during run-time and also provide the basis for a flexible control scheme for self-configuring multi-robot systems.