RePoSt: Distributed Self-Reconfiguration Algorithm for Modular Robots Based on Porous Structure

In this paper, we propose a new self-reconfiguration scheme for modular robots based on a metamodule design that allows to form a 3D porous structure. The porous structure enables a parallel flow of modules inside it without blocking. The metamodule can also be used to fill its internal volume with an additional number of modules allowing the structure to be compressible and expandable. Hence, it is a potential for improving the self-reconfiguration process. We first present the metamodule model and the porous structure built using it. Then, we describe an algorithm to self-reconfigure the structure from an initial shape to a given goal shape. We evaluated the algorithm in simulation on structures composed of up to 2,700 modules. We studied the performance in term of parallelism, showed that the number of communications is proportional to the number of motions and the execution time varies linearly with the diameter of the configuration.