A framework for taxonomy and evaluation of self-reconfigurable robotic systems

Self-reconfigurable robots have been proposed for a quite long period and in large numbers. However, there are very few systematic methodologies proposed to categorize and evaluate such kinds of robots. In this paper, we put forward a framework for taxonomy and evaluation (TAEV) of self-reconfigurable robots, based on the mechanism reconfigurability and the level of autonomy for reconfiguration. The mechanism reconfigurability of the robots is divided into two types: inter-reconfigurability and intra-reconfigurability which are quantified by the number of configurations and scale respectively. A combination of both the intra- and inter-reconfigurability feature is named as nested-reconfiguration. The levels of autonomy reconfigurability are ranging through different levels from manual teleoperation to fully autonomous systems. The evaluation metrics are introduced to quantify the level of autonomy and the sufficiency of self-reconfigurable robots. Detailed discussions on applications of the proposed framework are presented with real-robot examples.