This paper lays down the foundations of developing a reconfigurable control system within the Robot Operating System (ROS) for autonomous robots. The essential components of robots are programmed under a ROS system. A formal model is defined as a tripartite graph to represent the robots functional architecture. ROS systems are then generalised to component libraries for any ROS architecture and an abstract model as a “system graph” is introduced. Orthogonality of a library and a system graph is defined and redundancy levels of robot components are studied for maintaining full functionality of the robot by automated reconfiguration in face of hardware malfunction. This allows AI planning tools, such as Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), to compute permissible reconfigurations. We present an example of a pair of robotic arms which requires reconfiguration of the underlying control system in order to retain the capability to carry out a task.