Transformation design principles as enablers for designing reconfigurable robots

The design of cleaning and maintenance (CaM) robots are generally limited by their fixed morphologies. Contrary to the fixed robotic systems, design for reconfiguration in robots presents unique challenges. Reconfigurable robots pose the challenge of designing their subsystems and functionalities such that a robot meets its system, performance, and other fixed requirements, while providing reconfiguration capabilities to increase functionality and to provide innovative operational scenarios. Established transformation or reconfiguration principles, namely, expand/collapse, expose/cover, and fuse/divide, observed in several products-services-systems, can be adopted to design subsystems and system for reconfiguration in robots. Essentially these principles in many robots may be governed and implemented. The heuristic approach to design the reconfigurable robotic systems using three layers namely input, formulation and output layer is proposed. This paper used the design principles and associated facilitators and abstracts them to build a reconfigurable pavement cleaning robot named Panthera. Moreover, need, challenges, and design strategies for system and subsystem levels are presented. The system-level reconfiguration is to expand/collapse, whereas the subsystems, namely, i) Varying footprint, ii) Transmission, iii) Storage bin, iv) Cleaning brushes, v) Vacuum/Suction and blowing, and vi) Outer skin or cover are explained. The step-by-step illustration for reconfiguring the system and subsystem of Panthera is done by referring to the transformation principles, precedence, and mechanism adopted to achieve reconfiguration requirements.