Sensor networks and self-reconfigurable robots

A self-reconfigurable robot is a robotic device that can change its own shape. Self-reconfigurable robots are commonly built from multiple identical modules that can manipulate each other to change the shape of the robot. The robot can also perform tasks such as locomotion without changing shape. We observe that the challenges in programming self-reconfigurable robots are similar to the challenges in programming sensor networks: a large number of lowend embedded systems connected using ad-hoc networking need to gather information using sensors and to communicate information to other systems in the network. However, there are significant differences as well, notably a self-reconfigurable robot must typically function autonomously and the network topology will evolve continuously as the robot changes its shape. Software for self-reconfigurable robots, beyond controlling shape-change and locomotion, remains largely unexplored, but we believe experiences from sensor networks to be applicable within this domain. Moreover, we present an initial design of a middleware for selfreconfigurable robots and relate it to similar solutions for sensor networks.