A Novel Connection Mechanism for Dynamically Reconﬁgurable

Modular Robots

James White

, Mark A. Post

and Andy M. Tyrrell

Department of Electronic Engineering, The University of York, U.K.

Keywords:

Modular, Robotics, Reconﬁgurable.

Abstract:

This paper describes a novel hermaphroditic, single sided disconnect physical connector for heterogeneous

modular robots built using eight permanent magnets arranged in rotating pairs. The connector has 4 rotational

degrees of symmetry and incorporates power and data sharing. The connector has been designed as part of

a project creating 10 cm cubic heterogeneous modules but could be easily scaled to different sizes for other

applications. The paper begins with an introduction to connection mechanisms in modular robots, followed

by a detailed description of the design of the connector. A description of the simulation environment created

to test systems of interconnected modular robots is given, followed by the implementation and testing of the

connection system created.

1 INTRODUCTION

A modular robotic system consists of a set of inter-

connected robotic nodes, or modules, that together

form a larger robotic system. There are various clas-

siﬁcations of modular robotic systems, described in

detail by (Brunete et al., 2017) and (Yim et al., 2007).

The system described in this paper conforms to the

categories of dynamically reconﬁgurable and hetero-

geneous. A dynamically reconﬁgurable system is one

that can reconﬁgure it’s structure during run-time to

cope with local failures (such as ejecting a broken

module from the system) or functionality changes

(such as reconﬁguring for different locomotion strate-

gies or repositioning a sensor module for extended

ﬁeld of view). A heterogeneous modular robotic sys-

tem is one in which the modules that make up the

system are not all identical. These modules can in-

terconnect to form a larger system through the use of

a standardised mechanical and electrical interface.

Communication between modules was identiﬁed

as a major barrier to better systems of modular robots.

For modules to cooperate effectively, there is a need

for both high throughput and low latency communi-

cation. The majority of modular robot systems to

date have used Infrared, UART, CAN bus or Infrared

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7123-9348

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1925-7039

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8533-2404

diode pairs for their primary communication. While

these work well for propagating control commands

around a system, they do not work well for dynam-

ically reconﬁgurable systems with both low latency

and high throughput requirements. A network sys-

tem providing higher bandwidth and more resilient

communications for modular robots has been devel-

oped based on the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard for

the physical layer. A novel networking protocol to

handle data ﬂow and topology discovery in the net-

work is being developed for reconﬁgurable modular

robotic systems. This research is focused around a

system where modules have a 100mm cubic structure,

constructed out of six submodular tiles. The submod-

ular tile design enables the modules themselves to

be modular and share common components in man-

ufacture. This accelerates development of special-

ized heterogeneous modules and reduces design and

manufacturing costs as well as facilitating investiga-

tions into hierarchical modularity. A dynamically re-

conﬁgurable modular system needs to be able to per-

form in-process physical reconﬁguration. To facilitate

this, modules must have a robust electro-mechanical

connection mechanism that accommodates transfer of

mechanical forces, power and communication data.

The most fundamental design aspects of modular sys-

tem design are the use of common communication

and power transmission systems throughout these het-

erogeneous agents to allow them to create connect to-

gether for any conﬁguration needed for a given task.

White, J., Post, M. and Tyrrell, A.

A Novel Connection Mechanism for Dynamically Reconﬁgurable Modular Robots.

DOI: 10.5220/0011141100003271

In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO 2022), pages 385-394

ISBN: 978-989-758-585-2; ISSN: 2184-2809

385

These systems must be resilient to faults and fail-

ures as well as providing high communication band-

width and power throughput to keep systems operat-

ing in harsh and challenging environments. Potential

applications of dynamically reconﬁgurable heteroge-

neous modular robots include, but are not limited to:

modular satellites; A modular satellite system would

be greatly beneﬁcial to the space industry because if

there is a fault or upgrade needed, then a small, mod-

ule payload can be sent to the asset, which will then

autonomously reconﬁgure to accommodate it, rather

than requiring a whole new asset al.together to fulﬁll

requirements, reducing cost and extending in-service

life of satellites.

The research contributions of this paper are; a

novel interconnection and communications system

for reconﬁgurable modular robots from the physi-

cal layer up that is designed to allow modules in

a dynamically reconﬁgurable network to communi-

cate effectively, a novel rotating permanent magnet-

based physical connection mechanism for modular

robots that allows single sided disconnect and recon-

nect, a system of sharing data and power using the

permanent magnets as electrical conductors, and a

heterogeneous, dynamically reconﬁgurable modular

robotics platform that can demonstrate the effective-

ness of these novel systems and how they enable fur-

ther research to be carried out in the ﬁeld of modular

robotics.

2 PREVIOUS WORKS

This section provides a brief review of the literature to

date regarding modular robotic systems. A review of

the research history of modular robots is provided at

ﬁrst, followed by a quantitative review of communi-

cation systems used within modular robotic systems.

Finally a review of power distribution amongst nodes

in a modular robotic system is presented.

2.1 Modular Robots

Research into modular robotics systems was ﬁrst con-

ducted by Fukuda et al.(Fukuda and Nakagawa, 1988)

in 1988 with the creation of CEBOT. Since then, more

than 60 modular robot systems of varying capabilities

have been developed for research purposes. Modular

robotics have been identiﬁed as potentially beneﬁcial

to industries such as space(Yim et al., 2003), search

and rescue(Pfotzer et al., 2014) and other harsh en-

vironments where a system that can dynamically re-

conﬁgure to cope with partial failures or contain built

in redundancy mechanisms is desirable. There are a

number of detailed review papers published regard-

ing the ﬁeld of modular robotics (Yim et al., 2007;

Moubarak and Ben-Tzvi, 2012; Brunete et al., 2017;

Ahmadzadeh et al., 2016; Feczko et al., 2015).

2.2 Communication in Modular Robots

Throughout the 30 year history of modular robotics

research, authors have chosen to adopt many different

communication standards for their platforms. As the

underlying embedded technologies have evolved, so

have the physical layers and protocols used. Figure

1 shows the usage of different communication stan-

dards across all the modular robotic systems reviewed

over time. The modular robotic platforms are tabu-

lated in Table 1. Thirteen individual protocols were

found to be used. It can be seen that Infrared (IR)

is the most widely used, with nearly a quarter of all

modular robots using the technology. IR is a wire-

less protocol which is easy to implement in embedded

systems, this is likely why it is the choice for many

system designers. It is good for modular robotics as

it does not require an electrical connection between

modules, making mechanical design easier, but with

the need for line-of-sight for communication to work

and bandwidth limitations, it is unsuitable for a ro-

bust system. CAN is the second most popular choice

for communications between modules. It was ﬁrst

used by Yim et al. in the CKBot Platform(Yim et al.,

2007). CAN is a multi-drop bus based protocol which

was originally developed for communication between

processors in an automotive environment. Bluetooth

has been popular too as it is easy to implement due

to there being no need for electrical interface between

modules and that there are many bluetooth-to-serial

modules available commercially making electronics

implementation easy. Problems quickly arise with

bluetooth as the number of modules increase how-

ever, making it only suitable for small scale modular

systems. Bluetooth was implemented in the YaMoR

platform(Moeckel et al., 2006), with the authors not-

ing that is was primarily chosen for ease of imple-

mentation. To date only one modular robotic plat-

form has used Ethernet for communication between

modules. This was CoSMO platform by Liedke et

al.(Liedke et al., 2013). The authors cite the collision-

free, high-speed, hot-pluggable properties of Ether-

net inﬂuencing the decision to use it, along with the

ability to have arbitrary topologies and accumulating

bandwidth with the use of trunking of multiple packet

routes simultaneously.

ICINCO 2022 - 19th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics

386

Year of System Publication

Number of Uses

1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2020

LIN Magnetic serial Ethernet RS232 COMBUS 1-wire SPI

UART I2C RS485 Zigbee WIFI 2.4Ghz Wireless Bluetooth CAN

Figure 1: Chart showing the distribution of communications protocols used in modular robotics.

3 DESIGN

This section describes the design of the modular

robotic platform created as part of this research.

3.1 Mechanical

Work has been ongoing to develop a mechanical con-

nection system for the modular robotic system. The

connection system must be hermaphroditic, where

any module face can connect to any other module

face. The connection mechanism must also allow the

one module face to connect to another module face

in any 90 degree rotation, so there must be four ro-

tational degrees of symmetry. Finally the connection

mechanism must allow for single sided disconnection,

that is only one module needs to be able to initiate a

disconnection. This allows for the system to eject a

failed module. A review of modular robot connection

mechanisms was carried out by Saab et al. in (Saab

et al., 2019) which concluded that connection mecha-

nisms with hooks or pins are vulnerable to abrupt im-

pact forces, and claw-like mechanisms struggle to en-

sure rigidity. Magnetic connection mechanisms were

identiﬁed as needing further investigation as there was

little data on such mechanisms in macro scale modu-

lar robots.

Where a module is static, i.e. has no kinematic

peripherals, and it has no sensors that require the use

of a full face, all six sides of the module have an

inter-module connection mechanism to allow power

sharing and networking throughout the system. A full

module is depicted in 2. Where a module has a face

of it’s cubic structure dedicated to a peripheral, that

face may not have an inter-module connection mech-

anism. For example the castor module would not have

an inter-module connection mechanism on the face

that contains the castor wheel. The beneﬁt of hav-

ing a sub-modular tile design allows for application-

speciﬁc tiles to be created and ﬁtted to existing mod-

ules without having to design and build an entirely

new module.

A magnetic based coupling mechanism has been

developed to fulﬁl the requirements stated above.

This system is based around eight magnets arranged

in pairs that have a local frame of rotation. The con-

nection face is shown in Figure 3. Each pair of mag-

nets has one north pole at a normal to the connection

face, and one south pole at a normal to the connection

face. Each rotating magnet pair can rotate through

180 degrees. The mechanism is driven by a 298:1

gear ratio MP 6V Pololu Micro-Metal Gear Motor. A

video demonstrating the rotating magnet pairs can be

seen at (White, 2022b). The motor is mounted in the

center of the tile directly coupled to the driver gear

in the connection mechanism. The gearing of the

A Novel Connection Mechanism for Dynamically Reconﬁgurable Modular Robots

387

Table 1: Modular Robotic platforms grouped by inter-module communication protocol.

IR (Yim, 1994) (Murata et al., 1994) (Rus and Vona, 2000) (Castano et al., 2002)

(Suh et al., 2002) (Koseki et al., 2004) (Salemi et al., 2006) (Shimizu et al., 2006)

(Jørgensen et al., 2004) (Gilpin et al., 2008) (Dorigo et al., 2013) (Salem, 2014)

CAN (Yim et al., 2000) (Yim et al., 2007) (Yerpes et al., 2008) (Wei et al., 2010) (Baca

et al., 2012) (Pfotzer et al., 2014) (Fai

na et al., 2015) (Parrott, 2016)

Bluetooth (Moeckel et al., 2006) (Wolfe et al., 2012) (Jia et al., 2015) (Yerpes et al., 2008) (Baca

et al., 2012) (Parrott, 2016) (Ryland and Cheng, 2010)

2.4GHz Wireless (Zhu et al., 2013) (Pacheco et al., 2015) (Fai

na et al., 2015) (Oung and D’Andrea,

2011)

WiFi (Dorigo, 2005) (Ryland and Cheng, 2010) (O’Hara et al., 2014) (Davey et al., 2012)

Zigbee (Romanishin et al., 2013) (Zhang et al., 2014) (Baca et al., 2014) (Wei et al., 2010)

RS485 (Kotay et al., 1998) (Murata et al., 2002) (Lyder et al., 2008) (Lyder et al., 2010)

I2C (Daidi

e et al., 2007) (Zhang et al., 2008) (Gambao et al., 2005)

UART (Oung and D’Andrea, 2011) (Thakker et al., 2014) (Kee et al., 2014)

Others (Neubert and Lipson, 2016) (Fukuda and Kawauchi, 1990) (

Unsal et al., 1999) (Zykov

and Lipson, 2007) (Liedke et al., 2013) (White et al., 2004) (Gilpin et al., 2010)

Figure 2: CAD render of full module composed of six sub-

modular tiles.

connection mechanism can be seen in Figure 4 The

mounting for the motor can be seen in Figure 5.

Figure 3: CAD render with translucent sub-modular tile de-

picting the connection mechanism.

The connection mechanism has three states of op-

eration.

• Active Connect - In this state the magnet poles

of the face are aligned with the opposing magnet

poles of the opposite face. This creates a net at-

Figure 4: CAD render depicting the gearing of the connec-

tion mechanism.

Figure 5: CAD render depicting the motor mount for the

magnetic connector actuation.

tract force between modules and holds them to-

gether.

• Active Disconnect - In this state the magnet poles

of the face are aligned with the same magnet poles

of the opposite face, this creates a net repel force

between modules and pushes them apart.

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• Passive - In this state the magnet poles of the face

are 90 degrees offset from the magnet poles of

the opposing face, this creates a net zero force be-

tween the modules.

The tiles are assembled into a full module using

M3 bolts with corresponding nuts embedded into each

tile. This allows for disassembly on a per-tile basis.

3.2 Electronics

This section describes the electronic design to realise

a full module.

3.2.1 Electronics Architecture

The architecture of the electronics in a module is cen-

tered around a Xilinx Zynq 7020 SoC, which con-

tains two arm processing cores and Artix-7 FPGA

fabric. The FPGA portion of the device is utilised

for all networking protocol implementation, connect-

ing to 6 Ethernet physical layer transceivers, the TI

DP83825. Each tranceiver then connects to the corre-

sponding tile in the module, which contains the Eth-

ernet transformer, and connection to the tile magnets.

An overview of this architecture is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Block diagram depicting the architecture of the

electronics in a module.

3.2.2 Networking

As identiﬁed above, there is a need for signiﬁcant

improvement in networking of systems of modular

robots. A network supporting a modular robotic sys-

tem must be resilient to a dynamically reconﬁguring

physical topology. It must also support both time

critical control commands and high bandwidth sensor

streams propagating through the system. The IEEE

802.3 100Base-TX Ethernet standard was used as a

basis for the network hardware layer. 100Base-TX

Ethernet uses two twisted pairs of copper conduc-

tors to operate full-duplex 100Mbps communication.

One major beneﬁt identiﬁed for modular robots is that

some Ethernet physical layer ICs have the ability to

Figure 7: Conﬁguration of Ethernet conductors on tile mag-

nets.

Figure 8: Ethernet connection permutations.

detect and correct for crossover of pairs and crossover

of conductors in pairs. This means that, when the con-

ductors are arranged correctly, two modules can con-

nect in any orientation and the Ethernet PHY IC will

identify the connection conﬁguration operate as nor-

mal. The Ethernet data pairs are connected between

modules using the magnets that mechanically hold the

modules as conductors. Each conductor is connected

to two seperate magnets, in the conﬁguration shown

in Figure 7. This conﬁguration, where each conductor

is routed through opposing sides of the magnet face,

allows two tiles to connect in any orientation, and still

maintain an active Ethernet channel. This conﬁgura-

tion yields the connection permutations between two

nodes shown in 8. These permutations are repeated at

180 degree rotation intervals.

3.2.3 Power Distribution

In using transformer-isolated Ethernet as the con-

nection between modules, power can be distributed

between modules using a modiﬁed version of the

802.3af power over Ethernet (PoE) standard. This is

achieved by imposing a common mode voltage be-

tween the data pairs of the Ethernet channel via the

center tap of the Ethernet transformer. This allows

power and data to be shared between modules using

the same conductors, reducing the need for more elec-

trical contacts between modules which increases the

complexity of the design. Work is ongoing to im-

plement this into a module design, but initial tests

A Novel Connection Mechanism for Dynamically Reconﬁgurable Modular Robots

389

have been done to verify the feasibility of transmit-

ting power and data over an Ethernet channel with

magnetic conductors with success.

4 SIMULATION

This section describes the simulation environment de-

veloped to aid development of of the software for this

modular robotic platform. The simulation environ-

ment models both the mechanical properties of mod-

ules, and the communication channel used for module

interconnection.

4.1 Simulation Overview

To enable development of networking protocols, re-

conﬁguration algorithms, and task planning in this

modular robotic system, a holistic simulation envi-

ronment has been created to model the relevant as-

pects of the system. The simulation environment con-

tains two main components. The physical simulation

is performed using the Unity engine, and a custom

POSIX compliant network simulator has been created

to accurately model the network interconnections be-

tween modules. The network simulator is cyclically

triggered from the Unity simulator. Arbitrary module

conﬁgurations can be created in the simulator. Cur-

rently a model of a kinematically static module and a

wheel module exists. With this, modular rovers can

be created in simulation, like that shown in Figure 9

Figure 9: A modular rover conﬁguration in simulation.

Work is ongoing to perform experiments in simu-

lation. Currently, some initial experiments have been

run to test the models of the network side of the

simulator. Experiments were run on a 3x3x3 mod-

ule strictly orthogonal network of kinematically static

modules. A broadcast packet is sent from one of the

corner modules, and the time taken for that packet

to reach all other modules in the system is recorded.

This experiment is repeated with packet payload sizes

from 1-5 bytes. The results from this experiment is

shown in Figure 10. These results show the latency of

the packet propagation increasing with payload size

as expected. A render of the network of modules used

in this simulation is shown in Figure 11. Once full

integration of a module’s mechanical and electronic

components have been created, this experiment can

be repeated in hardware to test the reality gap of the

simulator, and tune the parameters of the models used.

Figure 10: Simulation results of propagation delay of a

broadcast packet in a strictly orthogonal network for vary-

ing packet payload sizes (bytes).

Figure 11: Render of a 3x3x3 strictly orthogonal network

of modules in simulation.

4.2 Simulation Experimental Plan

Work is ongoing to perform more experiments in sim-

ulation. Now that hardware development is nearing

completion, work can be done to implement topology

discovery and routing protocols for the dynamically

reconﬁgurable modular system. Once these imple-

mentations are completed, these can be tested in simu-

lation to test their performance against other systems.

The network model can be modiﬁed to accurately

model other communications channels including SPI,

CAN, UART, IR, etc. This will allow for quantitative

performance comparison between the system imple-

mented here and other communication systems used

in other research projects.

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390

5 HARDWARE

IMPLEMENTATION

This section describes the current implementation of

the module design described in the previous section.

5.1 Module Mechanical Implementation

The mechanical components of the modules have

been 3D printed in PLA+. All printing was done on

an Intamsys Funmat HT 3D printer. Images of an as-

sembled tile and module can be seen in 12. The left

module is in passive state, the right module is in active

connect state. Tests have been carried out to verify

that the connection mechanism works as described.

A video showing the transition from active connect to

disconnect can be seen at (White, 2022a).

Figure 12: Left: assembled module in passive connection

state. Right: assembled module in active connection state.

5.2 Module Electronics

A PCB has been designed and manufactured, shown

in Figure 13, around a Trenz electronic TE0720 Sys-

tem on Module (SoM). The SoM is a 4cm x 5cm

PCB that contains a Zynq 7010 System on Chip

(SoC), 1GB DDR3 RAM and 8Gb e.MMC non-

volatile memory. It is designed to connect to a custom

carrier board with board to board connectors for ap-

plication speciﬁc uses. The carrier board designed for

this project contains six TI DP83825 Ethernet PHY

ICs, two CSI camera connectors, an SD card slot and

connections for power, programming and GPIO ac-

cess.

6 FUTURE HARDWARE

DEVELOPMENT PLANS

Current hardware development has concluded the

prototyping phase of the project. In the coming

months a number of modules are to be developed and

Figure 13: The compute module PCB populated with the

TE0720 SoM.

integration of system components completed to cre-

ate a working modular robotics platform to demon-

strate the work done here. To create a useful system,

more than just kinematically static modules will have

to be created, currently there are a number of hetero-

geneous modules scheduled for development.

6.1 Wheel Module

This module has a face with a motorised wheel at-

tached to it. Each of the other ﬁve faces contain an

inter-module connection mechanism. There is a net-

worked microcontroller in the module with the appro-

priate motor control electronics along with the net-

work processing FPGA.

6.2 Joint Module

A joint module contains 1 to 3 rotational degrees of

freedom. These modules will allow the system to

form kinematic chains for locomotion or manipula-

tion of objects.

6.3 Sensor Module

A sensor module is a kinematically static module with

a sensor attached to one or more faces. To date a cam-

era module has been developed. There are plans to de-

velop a module with rangeﬁnders to aid in localisation

and obstacle detection tasks. The beneﬁt of having

dedicated sensor modules is that they can be moved

around the morphology of modules as required by the

system for a given task.

7 CONCLUSION

This paper has presented the work done to date on a

novel interconnection mechanism for dynamically re-

conﬁgurable modular robotics. The system described

A Novel Connection Mechanism for Dynamically Reconﬁgurable Modular Robots

391

in this paper includes mechanical connection by way

of rotating permanent magnets, communication us-

ing Ethernet for the physical layer utilizing the mag-

nets as the electrical connection between modules,

and power sharing via a modiﬁed power over Eth-

ernet system using the same conductors as the data

pairs. The system has been successfully protoyped

and mechanically tested, work is ongoing to integrate

the electronics and mechanical hardware together to

perform holistic testing. Initial experiments have been

performed in simulation to assess the accuracy of the

network simulator. Work is ongoing to perform ex-

periments with rover modules, and implement proto-

cols for topology discovery and routing of data pack-

ets through the system.

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