Identifying opportunities for the design of innovative reconfigurable robotics

The creative design of reconfigurable robots presents challenges that can be tackled by the application of transformation principles for innovative design. This paper extends previous work in the systematic extraction of transformation principles in mechanical systems and reports new results that apply to the design of innovative reconfigurable robotics. Definitions of key terms are revised and a deductive research approach is used to expand and complement the conceptual classification of design operators (principles, facilitators and guidelines) based on semantic analysis of lexical structure, written and spoken conventions. The aim of this work is to produce a comprehensive taxonomy and semantic representation that can be used in the systematic identification of opportunities for the design of innovative solutions in reconfigurable robotics. This semantically robust, comprehensive and cross-domain conceptual taxonomy is tested in the mapping of large knowledge bases, demonstrating its potential to characterize large solution spaces and to identify new opportunities for the design of innovative solutions. Specialized assessments in the area of robotics and design show that this method successfully captures the qualitative reasoning of seasoned practitioners and has a clear potential to inform the design of innovative transformer designs.