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A characterization of the reconfiguration space of self-reconfiguring robotic systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2011

Tom Larkworthy  and
Subramanian Ramamoorthy
Tom Larkworthy*
Affiliation:
Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB email: s.ramamoorthy@ed.ac.uk
Subramanian Ramamoorthy
Affiliation:
Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB email: s.ramamoorthy@ed.ac.uk
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: tom.larkworthy@gmail.com
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Summary

Motion planning for self-reconfiguring robots can be made efficient by exploiting potential reductions to suitably large subspaces. However, there are no general techniques for identifying suitable restrictions that have a positive effect on planning efficiency. We present two approaches to understanding the structure that is required of the subspaces, which leads to improvement in efficiency of motion planning. This work is presented in the context of a specific motion planning procedure for a hexagonal metamorphic robot. First, we use ideas from spectral graph theory – empirically estimating the algebraic connectivity of the state space – to show that the HMR model is better structured than many alternative motion catalogs. Secondly, using ideas from graph minor theory, we show that the infinite sequence of subspaces generated by configurations containing increasing numbers of subunits is well ordered, indicative of regularity of the space as complexity increases. We hope that these principles could inform future algorithm design for many different types of self-reconfiguring robotics problems.

Keywords

Self-reconfiguring roboticsMotion planningGraph theory
Type
Article
Information
Robotica , Volume 29 , Special Issue 1: Robotic Self-X Systems , January 2011 , pp. 73 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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