Distributed Tunneling Reconfiguration of Sliding Cubic Modular Robots in Severe Space Requirements

Abstract

This paper studies a tunneling-based reconfiguration algorithm for cubic modular robots. Tunneling based reconfigurations have advantages in severe space requirements. This is because a tunneling modular robot only uses spaces occupied by the start and goal configurations. However, previously proposed methods have a limitation on the arrangement of start and goal configurations, in which the overlapped part between the start and goal configurations must be connected. We propose a tunneling reconfiguration algorithm that removes the limitation and is available for cases with multi-overlapped parts between the start and goal configurations. The proposed algorithm uses a three-dimensional 2 × 2 × 2 meta-module to maintain the connectivity and mobility of the robot structure. We implement the algorithm in a distributed form. We prove the completeness of the proposed reconfiguration algorithm for assumed robot structures. We examine the proposed tunneling algorithm by simulation.