Robust and reversible self-reconfiguration

Modular, self-reconfigurable robots are robots that can change their own shape by physically rearranging the modules from which they are built. Self-reconfiguration can be controlled by e. g. an off-line planner, but numerous implementation issues hamper the actual self-reconfiguration process: the continuous evolution of the communication topology increases the risk of communications failure, generating code that correctly controls the self-reconfiguration process is non-trivial, and hand-tuning the self-reconfiguration process is tedious and error-prone. To address these issues, we have developed a distributed scripting language that controls self-reconfiguration of the ATRON robot using a robust communication scheme that relies on local broadcast of shared state. This language can be used as the target of a planner, offers direct support for parallelization of independent operations while maintaining correct sequentiality of dependent operations, and compiles to a robust and efficient implementation. Moreover, a novel feature of this language is its reversibility: once a self-reconfiguration sequence is described the reverse sequence is automatically available to the programmer, significantly reducing the amount of work needed to deploy self-reconfiguration in larger scenarios. We demonstrate our approach with long-running (reversible) self-reconfiguration experiments using the ATRON robot and a reversible self-reconfiguration experiment using simulated MTRAN modules.

Authors

• Ulrik Pagh Schultz
• Mirko Bordignon
• Kasper Støy

Keywords

• Robustness
• Robots
• Communication system control
• Shape
• Topology
• Process control
• Error correction codes
• Robust control
• Broadcasting
• Programming profession
• Parallelization
• Communication Failure
• Simulation Module
• Semantic
• Modulation Of Activity
• Global Status
• Local State
• Robotic System
• State Machine
• Communication Protocol
• Virtual Machines
• Software Defect
• Parallel Operation
• Role Conceptions
• Idempotent
• Code Generation
• Partial Failure
• Manually Optimized
• Running Example