@inproceedings{dewey-iros08,
author = {Dewey, Daniel and Srinivasa, Siddhartha S. and
Ashley-Rollman, Michael P. and De~Rosa, Michael and Pillai,
Padmanabhan and Mowry, Todd C. and Campbell, Jason D. and
Goldstein, Seth Copen},
title = {Generalizing Metamodules to Simplify Planning in Modular
Robotic Systems},
booktitle = {Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ 2008 International Conference
on Intelligent Robots and Systems {IROS '08}},
year = {2008},
address = {Nice, France},
month = {Sep},
abstract = {In this paper we develop a theory of metamodules and an
associated distributed asynchronous planner which generalizes
previous work on metamodules for lattice-based modular robotic
systems. All extant modular robotic systems have some form of
non-holonomic motion constraints. This has prompted many
researchers to look to metamodules, i.e., groups of modules that
act as a unit, as a way to reduce motion constraints and the
complexity of planning. However, previous metamodule designs have
been specific to a particular modular robot. By analyzing the
constraints found in modular robotic systems we develop a
holonomic metamodule which has two important properties: (1) it
can be used as the basic unit of an efficient planner and (2) it
can be instantiated by a wide variety of different underlying
modular robots, e.g., modular robot arms, expanding cubes,
hex-packed spheres, etc. Using a series of transformations we
show that our practical metamodule system has a provably complete
planner. Finally, our approach allows the task of shape
transformation to be separated into a planning task and a
resource allocation task. We implement our planner for two
different metamodule systems and show that the time to completion
scales linearly with the diameter of the ensemble.},
url = {http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~claytronics/papers/dewey-iros08.pdf},
keywords = {Meld, Planning, Multi-Robot Formations, Controlling
Ensembles, Robotics},
}