2008 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Reconfiguration of Cube-Style Modular Robots Using O(logn) Parallel Moves
Authors : Greg Aloupis, Sébastien Collette, Erik D. Demaine, Stefan Langerman, Vera Sacristán, Stefanie Wuhrer
Published in: Algorithms and Computation
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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We consider a model of reconfigurable robot, introduced and prototyped by the robotics community. The robot consists of independently manipulable unit-square atoms that can extend/contract arms on each side and attach/detach from neighbors. The optimal worst-case number of sequential moves required to transform one connected configuration to another was shown to be
Θ
(
n
) at ISAAC 2007. However, in principle, atoms can all move simultaneously. We develop a parallel algorithm for reconfiguration that runs in only
O
(log
n
) parallel steps, although the total number of operations increases slightly to
Θ
(
n
log
n
). The result is the first (theoretically) almost-instantaneous universally reconfigurable robot built from simple units.