Distributed, dynamic, and autonomous reconfiguration planning for chain-type self-reconfigurable robots

This paper presents a dynamic and distributed reconfiguration planning algorithm for chain-type self-reconfigurable robots, by which a robot can autonomously self-reconfigure from one arbitrary acyclic configuration to another in a distributed way. The novel features of this algorithm include: (1) an efficient representation for unlabeled complex configurations; (2) a distributed comparison to detect common/different substructures in two configurations; (3) reconfiguration are limited to those modules that indicate the differences in topology; and (4) reconfiguration actions are performed in parallel and distributed fashion, where every module decides its own actions locally and coordinate asynchronously to rearrange into the goal configuration. The algorithm is applicable to any chain-type self-reconfigurable robots in general.