IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2015 - 33

design example for the development of a simple twowheeled robot that can be specified as the sides of two
motors (right half seg and left half seg in Figure 8)
attached to a central core (seg brain in Figure 8). To
add stability, a third point of contact, such as a tail, can
be added to a free end.
The overall vision is to be able to extract dynamic and
kinematical models from the mechanical model developed
though ROSLab. Physical parameters, such as the dimension, weight, and moment of inertia, could be extracted
from the designed system and then passed to a mathematical control system representation to create a more accurate
model of the plant.
The popupCAD tool [31] is a design environment that
facilitates the development of laminate devices, pop-up mechanisms, and flat-foldable structures. This design suite is
implemented in Python and QT and has the ability to create
and perform operations on 2-D geometric primitives. The
tool allows the sketching of lines, polygons, and circles, as well
as the extraction of information from Solidworks, the definition of bodies and joints, while taking the manufacturing process into consideration.
Cogeneration of Electrical and Software Designs
From an electronic perspective, two main cogeneration
philosophies are available, a modular approach and an
embedded generation of the PCBs. Both approaches have
advantages and disadvantages. The circuits created with
modular specifications are reusable, well tested, task specific, and supported by the Arduino [39] and Sparkfun [40]
communities. However, the electronic modules also have
disadvantages. They are larger in volume and mass compared with the dedicated boards, as they must accommodate large numbers of connectors, many of which go
unused and are generally unreliable. Modules also have an
increased cost over the raw parts associated with supporting the module manufacturer. On the other hand, embedded PCBs can be optimized so that the overall size and
weight of the final board is reduced, which are the critical
factors when building small print-and-fold robots, as discussed in the "Origami-Inspired Folding" and "Additive
Manufacturing" sections.
In [41], the authors who developed ROSLab introduce
the EMLab environment for the rapid codesign of the
embedded PCBs [Figure 9(a)]. The tool uses a similar dragand-drop graphical interface, like in ROSLab, in which the
electromechanical components are represented as blocks
connected together on a workspace to describe a PCB
design. The tool takes the advantage of a library of electromechanical components schematics called ecosystem, created a priori by expert developers, that contains the pin
specifications associated with each component and their
software function. Underneath this simplified interface, a
pin-matching algorithm combined with a verification
framework builds all connections to realize an EAGLE [42]
schematic [Figure 9(b)].

(a)

(b)

(c)
Figure 9. (a) A Seg robot PCB designed within the EMLab codesign
environment. (b) From left to right: the generated EMLab schematic
in EAGLE, placed and routed board in EAGLE, and final fabricated
PCB. (c) The final mini Seg robot created with EMLab [41].

Figure 9(a) shows a snapshot of EMLab with all necessary
nodes for the design of a two-wheel Seg robot PCB. Figure
9(b) shows the generated schematic and manufactured PCB,
and finally, Figure 9(c) displays the final Seg robot with the
PCB created from EMLab.
Mehta et al. [9] proposed a modularized
A significant challenge in
approach to facilitate the
automatic composition
this research direction is
of electrical devices. In
particular, they devela lack of formal methods
oped a generic module
that features a microfor the development of
controller and three
general-purpose ports
rubberlike systems.
f or c on n e c t i n g t h e
DECEMBER 2015

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2015