MEAM Seminar: “Modboats: Building an Aquatic Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robotic System out of Underactuated Modules”

Modular robots offer the promise of flexibility; we will be able to deploy teams of generalist modules and reconfigure them into various specialists to perform whatever task is necessary. Surface swimming aquatic modular robots in particular are not well studied, however, because the literature assumes that the modules need to be holonomic, which makes them expensive and difficult to build and maintain. We disrupt this assumption with the Modboat – an inexpensive, underactuated surface swimmer that uses only one motor to propel and steer itself along the ocean surface, and is capable of all the behaviors required of a modular self-reconfigurable robotic system (MSRR). In this seminar, I present my work on designing the Modboat modules, achieving near holonomic motion capabilities using temporal multiplexing, and developing the capabilities needed for modular self-reconfiguration.