Abstraction of the Body Ability of the Transformer Robot System for the Transportation and Installation of Heavy Objects in Land and Underwater Environments

To give the single robot system the ability to realize many behaviors and to realize tasks with shifting environments and objectives, it is necessary to abstract the robot’s body ability to the extent that they can be detected by sensors in the body so that we can plan as the problem of state transition. In this paper, to abstract the transformer robot system that performs heavy lifting and environmental attachment tasks in an aquatic and terrestrial environment, we extend the graphical representation of the robot’s body to manage joint capability and the body adaptability for the environment. To abstract the body ability, we divide the body into elements and define Connection between them at three different granularities. And using Connection, we propose the Connection Modification Feature(CMF) as the representation for changing body ability. To implement the Connection Modification Feature, we perform the abstract description and extract Connection to construct Body Ability Graph, a graph for the robot to manage its body ability. We show that it is possible to plan to manipulate and use its own Connection Modification Feature through multiple experiments by defining Normal Action that does not change body abilities and Body Ability Modifying Action that manipulate body abilities.