Fault-Tolerant and System-Wide Communication for Metamorphic Robots

One of the future directions the robotic community deals with is the vision of reconfigurable and self-assembling robots. Such robots can assemble themselves into more complex configurations to take the shape that suits their mission the most. An exciting concept is a metamorphic robotic system in which all the modules serving as building blocks are uniform and small-scale. In such a system, the modules must be able to connect and disconnect from other modules dynamically using a connector that provides the modules with data and power connection on top of the physical binding. The limited physical size and computation resources prevent the usage of the standard existing network and power interfaces. While some solutions to connectors of metamorphic robots have been introduced at the hardware level, the software solutions are still quite incomplete. In this paper, we address a piece of the software part. We present an efficient and system-wide solution to inter-module communication. Moreover, we demonstrate and evaluate our solution on an existing metamorphic robotic platform.