Tentacle-Based Shape Shifting of Metamorphic Robots Using Fast Inverse Kinematics

Abstract

We present a new approach to tackle the problem of metamorphic robots' reconfiguration. Given the chain-type metamorphic robot's initial and target configuration, we compute a reconfiguration plan that is provably physically collision-free. Our solution employs a specific heuristic. The robot initially reconfigures to a shape that resembles an octopus with many tentacles. After that, the tentacles gradually reconnect to each other using inverse kinematics, separating one tentacle from the body and keeping the other one connected. This strategy eventually leads to a snake-like structure of the robot. For the target configuration, we compute the reconfiguration plan with the same procedure, however, we reverse the plan to reconfigure the robot from the snake-like structure to the target shape. According to our experimental evaluation, our newly introduced strategy for finding reconfiguration plans is successful. It efficiently finds collision-free plans even for robots consisting of hundreds of modules.