<title>Connectivity planning for closed-chain reconfiguration</title>

Abstract

Modular reconfigurable robots can change their connectivity from one arrangement to another. Performing this change involves a difficult planning problem. We study this problem by representing robot configurations as graphs, and giving an algorithm that can transform any configuration of a robot into any other in O (log n) steps. Here n is the number of modules which can attach to more than two other modules. We also show that O(log n) is best possible.