A Bioinspired Approach Combining L-Systems and Cellular Automata for Distributed Self-Reconfiguration of UBot Modular Robotic Systems

Self-reconfiguration of Modular Self-Reconfigurable (MSR) robots is a fundamental primitive that can be used as part of higher-lever functionality. The biological principle of self-organizing and growth in both animals and plants is learned to solve the automatic planning of configuration and control methods. A bioinspired approach is proposed for distributed self-reconfiguration. This method aims at utilizing the self-organization and pattern emergence of the MSR robotic system, which is made of large quantity of modules to promote the system to reconfigure in the direction of adapting to environments and tasks. This mechanism is hybrid by combining Lindenmayer systems (L-systems) and Cellular Automata (CA). L-systems are introduced for defining global structure and providing topological description. Cellular Automata (CA) handle motion planning of distributed modules. This method is absolutely distributed and convergent to self-adaptive structures with desired organizing principles. The convergence of proposed method is verified through simulations and experiments on UBot robots.