Distributed planning and control for modular robots with unit-compressible modules

Dartmouth Technical Report TR2003-462

	Zack Butler
	Daniela Rus

Date: June 2003

URL (compressed postscript): <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2003-462.ps.Z> (2344KB)

URL (PDF): <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2003-462.pdf> (1336KB)

Abstract:
 Self-reconfigurable robots are versatile systems consisting of large
 numbers of independent modules.  Effective use of these systems
 requires parallel actuation and planning, both for efficiency and
 independence from a central controller.  This paper presents the
 PacMan algorithm, a technique for distributed actuation and planning
 for systems with two- or three-dimensional unit-compressible modules.
 We give two versions of the algorithm along with correctness analysis.
 We also analyze the parallel actuation capability of the algorithm,
 showing that it will not deadlock and will avoid disconnecting the
 robot.  We have implemented PacMan on the Crystal robot, a hardware
 system developed in our lab, and we present experiments and discuss
 the feasibility of large-scale implementation.