Control of a self-assembly modular robot system over a wireless ZigBee network

This paper emphasizes the control problem of a self-assembly modular robot with wireless network load. A self-assembly modular robot driven by four micro DC motors is used as an example, which is named Sambot. Each motor is controlled by a separate microcontroller-ATMega8 for driving, and the ATMega8 also complete the encoder and sensor information collection, the left and right wheel drive motor are used for the control of linear and angular velocities of the robot modular, the other one motor is used for the docking-platform rotating between two robot modular, and the last one motor is used for the hook lock after successfully docking. A Zigbee network is implemented between each other modular robot uses TI's CC2430 chip with C51 microcontroller core for the realization of the underlying layer protocol stack and upper layer application, and a CAN Bus communication uses VP230 as CAN transceiver to connect with the CAN interface when they are docking locked. The wireless network controlled system and the communication network are simulated respectively with Matlab/Simulink and Truetime, and the mobile self-assembly robot control and communication system has been a very good real-time and low-jitter validation.