Self-organization of motion

In contrast with lattice-type modular robots capable of self-reconfiguration, chain-type modular robots are made for flexible motions, exploiting their multiple degrees of freedom. Motion control is one of the major areas of robotics, and knowledge accumulated through years of experience is applicable to chain type modular robots. Most of such knowledge and methods, however, are suited to a centralized controller based on a complete and precise model. In this chapter, we explore a way to design distributed motion control for modular robots. We start with building a homogeneous distributed control system applicable to any robot configuration. The system then is optimized accordingly to each specific robot configuration.