Morphological reconfiguration monitoring for homogeneous self-reconfigurable robots

Morphological computation (MC) has revolutionized robotic systems employing morphological properties (MP). Thus far, morphology has been mostly used to analyze morphological functionalities qualitatively after design phase of robotic systems. Furthermore, morphology has verified qualitative requirements, not modeled quantitative specifications. To fill this gap, we present a distributed algorithm to monitor module reconfiguration for homogeneous self-reconfigurable robots (HSRs) considering the size of modules. In this method, neighboring modules of a particular module occupy a spatial region called adjacency configuration (AC), whose size depends on the module size; then, we monitor occupancies by sweeping AC locally, so any detected collision represents a neighboring module. The algorithm is illustrated by 2-D and 3-D examples.