Roombots—Towards decentralized reconfiguration with self-reconfiguring modular robotic metamodules

This paper presents our work towards a decentralized reconfiguration strategy for self-reconfiguring modular robots, assembling furniture-like structures from Roombots (RB) metamodules. We explore how reconfiguration by locomotion from a configuration A to a configuration B can be controlled in a distributed fashion. This is done using Roombots metamodules-two Roombots modules connected serially-that use broadcast signals, lookup tables of their movement space, assumptions about their neighborhood, and connections to a structured surface to collectively build desired structures without the need of a centralized planner.