Reconfiguration of Autonomous Robotics

2.1. Rationale and Problems

It is widely realized that the development of military or industrial applicable robots is subject to change, which is mainly caused by two major aspects – unexpected environment and higher customer orientation. The possibility of the environment irregularly changing causes the robot configuration to change. Many uncertainty issues are raised unpredictably which challenge the robot configuration every moment. The ability of an end-customer to configure nearly unique individual co-robots results in sophisticated challenges for the modeling and design of reliable autonomous mobile system (AMS) production. The diversity of variants is growing. In addition it is possible that an increasing demand to offer a band of new functions leads to shorter product life cycles in the robot design. To be able to provide reliable and correct AMS robots and analyze and reason the AMS precisely is highly desirable. In particular, reconfigurable robotic systems are promising alternatives to the design of new sophisticated functions. In case of modeling, design and verification of AMS, reconfigurable robotic systems can reduce redesign efforts and do not require rescheduling of entire production lines. Major impact factors to the design of reconfigurable robots are shown in Figure 1. They are subdivided into requirement and environment driven aspects.

Figure 1.

Impact factors of reconfigurable autonomous robots