ModCube: Modular, Self-Assembling Cubic Underwater Robot

TL;DR

ModCube introduces a low-cost, modular underwater robot platform capable of self-assembly and swarm coordination, with novel benchmarks and analysis demonstrating its effectiveness for omnidirectional underwater tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents a new modular robot design, a novel method for behavior visualization, and four benchmarks for morphological performance evaluation.

Findings

ModCube is effective for omnidirectional underwater tasks.

The system demonstrates robust control and self-assembly in water tanks.

Open-source design facilitates future research.

Abstract

This paper presents a low-cost, centralized modular underwater robot platform, ModCube, which can be used to study swarm coordination for a wide range of tasks in underwater environments. A ModCube structure consists of multiple ModCube robots. Each robot can move in six DoF with eight thrusters and can be rigidly connected to other ModCube robots with an electromagnet controlled by onboard computer. In this paper, we present a novel method for characterizing and visualizing dynamic behavior, along with four benchmarks to evaluate the morphological performance of the robot. Analysis shows that our ModCube design is desirable for omnidirectional tasks, compared with the configurations widely used by commercial underwater robots. We run real robot experiments in two water tanks to demonstrate the robust control and self-assemble of the proposed system, We also open-source the design and code to facilitate future research.