Programming for Modular Reconfigurable Robots

Abstract

Composed of multiple modular robotic units, selfreconfigurable modular robots are metamorphic systems that can autonomously rearrange the modules and form different configurations for dynamic environments and tasks. Selfreconfiguration is to solve how to change connectivity among modules to transform the robot from the current configuration into the goal configuration within the restrictions of physical implementation. The existing reconfiguration algorithms used different methods, such as divide-and-conquer, graph matching etc, to reduce the reconfiguration cost. However, the optimal solution with least reconfiguration steps has never been reached. The optimal reconfiguration planning problem of finding the least number of reconfiguration steps to transform between two configurations is NP-complete. In this paper we describe an approach to solve this problem. This approach is based on constructing a logical models for considered problem.