Roles and Self-Reconfigurable Robots

Abstract

Abstract. A self-reconfigurable robot is a robotic device that can change its own shape. Self-reconfigurable robots are commonly built from mul-tiple identical modules that can manipulate each other to change the shape of the robot. The robot can also perform tasks such as locomotion without changing shape. Programming a modular, self-reconfigurable robot is however a complicated task: the robot is essentially a real-time, distributed embedded system, where control and communication paths often are tightly coupled to the current physical configuration of the robot. To facilitate the task of programming modular, self-reconfigurable robots, we have developed a declarative, role-based language that allows the programmer to associate roles and behavior to structural elements in a modular robot. Based on the role declarations, a dedicated middle-ware for high-level distributed communication is generated, significantly simplifying the task of programming self-reconfigurable robots. Our lan-guage fully supports programming the ATRON self-reconfigurable robot, and has been used to implement several controllers running both on the physical modules and in simulation. 1