Название: Multi-modality Control of Reconfigurable Swarm
Автор: Tao Jiang, Zhi Zheng, Lan Yao, Jianchuan Ye, Jianxiang Wang, Jingxiang Feng
Издательство: Springer
Год: 2025
Страниц: 190
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 25.3 MB

This book is intended for the fields of control engineering and swarm coordination. It introduces the fundamental methods and application technologies of a novel multi-agent system—reconfigurable swarms—in formation coordination, reconfiguration docking, task scheduling, and multi-modality control. The proposed overall control methodologies are validated through MATLAB simulations and physical experiments, offering effective theoretical and technical guidance for the emerging area of multi-modality control in reconfigurable swarm systems. This book is suitable for engineering professionals engaged in swarm systems and control technologies, and can also serve as a valuable reference for researchers in related academic institutions.

- Designs a new type of self-reconfigurable robot with multimodal operation capabilities
- Studies the kinematics and dynamics of the self-reconfigurable robot unit and combinatorial modes of operation
- Combines various advanced control methods to solve the robust control issues of self-reconfigurable robots

With the rapid advancement of unmanned and intelligent technologies, mobile robots are accelerating their application scenarios from structured zones to complex, diverse zones. Unlike structured environments such as ports, factories, and households, unstructured scenarios like abandoned buildings and wild caves exhibit heterogeneous terrain variations and narrow interlaced passages. Existing vehicles with fixed configurations or weakly reconfigurable designs demonstrate limited flexibility in capability deployment, struggling to balance “capability” and “efficiency”. As a novel swarm system, reconfigurable swarms consist of multiple modular units capable of both independent mobility and collective reconfiguration. Through physical connections between modular units, the system adaptively reconfigures into combination modalities of varying scales to move complex terrains, while decomposing into distributed wireless-networked units via virtual connections for efficient parallel operations in flat or confined spaces. Compared with traditional swarms and large fixed-configuration vehicles, reconfigurable swarms achieve on-demand capability aggregation and dispersion in response to environmental features and mission requirements, demonstrating superior adaptability in unstructured scenarios. This positions them as a critical research direction for overcoming application bottlenecks in robotic operations within complex unstructured environments.

Reconfigurable swarms achieve scenario adaptability through modal switching between modular units and combination modalities, along with multi-modality behavior control during group operations. However, compared to conventional swarm systems and reconfigurable swarm systems, they require coordinated operation across three modalities: individual units, combination modality, and swarms. Significant differences exist in task requirements and response mechanisms across modalities, resulting in higher-dimensional system variables and more complex operational scenarios. Moreover, individual unit modality control involves more constraints and intensified uncertain disturbances compared to homogeneous vehicle control. Multimodal Reconfiguration control further presents challenges, including real-time modality-scenario matching, optimal unit selection, and precise rapid docking, making technical implementation particularly demanding. This monograph focuses on reconfigurable swarms, researching autonomous swarm control to establish a comprehensive technical framework for adaptive multi-modular swarm control.

The technical exposition follows a progressive architecture of “theoretical foundations-core technologies-system integration-application validation”, encompassing reconfigurable swarm multimodal modeling, coordination control, combination modality control, reconfiguration docking, and modal scheduling, essentially covering all core procedures of autonomous swarm control. The book also details the design methodology of a self-developed physical platform for reconfigurable swarms, with all theoretical approaches systematically validated through platform-based experiments.

The hardware system of the reconfigurable swarm unit mainly composed of a control board, power system, communication module, power supply system, servo rudder module, and positioning marker. The control board is composed of the STM32F103ZET6 microcontroller and its peripheral circuits, responsible for receiving the desired velocity commands from the swarm host, sending the modular unit velocity status, generating the lower-level kinematic velocity control commands (desired torque current) and sending them to the torque motor. It is the core of the modular unit’s lower-level control system. The STM32F103ZET6, as a low-cost, high-performance processor promoted by STMicroelectronics, has the advantages of small chip size, low system power consumption, and a rich set of general-purpose IO ports.