Autonomous discovery and functional response to topology change in self-reconfigurable robots

The topology of a self-reconfigurable robot can change at anytime. This can be as a result of the failure of some modules of the robot, joining new modules to the robot, displacement of some modules from one location to another caused by the self-reconfiguration task or any combination of these cases. Considering that the process of selecting relevant behaviors to accomplish a given task is based on the current topology of the self-reconfigurable robot, modules must be able to detect and respond to any changes to the robot topology. When changes to the topology of the robot are detected, modules can investigate new ways of accomplishing the given task. This paper presents a distributed solution, FEATURE algorithm, to the problem of autonomous discovery and functional response to topology change. The result is experimentally verified and demonstrated on the CONRO self-reconfigurable robots.