A distributed self-reconfiguration algorithm for cylindrical lattice-based modular robots

Andre Naz (1) , Benoit Piranda (1) , Seth Copen Goldstein (2) , Julien Bourgeois (1)

1 FEMTO-ST - Franche-Comté Électronique Mécanique, Thermique et Optique - Sciences et Technologies (UMR 6174)
2 CMU - Carnegie Mellon University [Pittsburgh]

Modular self-reconfigurable robots are composed of independent connected modules which can self-rearrange their connectivity using processing, communication and motion capabilities, in order to change the overall robot structure. In this paper, we consider rolling cylindrical modules arranged in a two-dimensional vertical hexagonal lattice. We propose a parallel, asynchronous and fully decentralized distributed algorithm to self-reconfigure robots from an initial configuration to a goal one. We evaluate our algorithm on the millimeter-scale cylindrical robots, developed in the Claytronics project, through simulation of large ensembles composed of up to ten thousand modules. We show the effectiveness of our algorithm and study its performance in terms of communications, movements and execution time. Our observations indicate that the number of communications, the number of movements and the execution time of our algorithm is highly predictable. Furthermore, we observe execution times that are linear in the size of the goal shape.

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]; Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]; Technologies Émergeantes [cs.ET]; Informatique ubiquitaire; Système multi-agents [cs.MA]; Modélisation et simulation; Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Andre Naz, Benoit Piranda, Seth Copen Goldstein, Julien Bourgeois. A distributed self-reconfiguration algorithm for cylindrical lattice-based modular robots. International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, Oct 2016, Cambridge, MA, United States. ⟨hal-02300456⟩