Distributed task coordination in modular self-reconfigurable robots

Modular Self-reconfigurable robotic systems consists of many autonomous modules, which can optimize their configurations according to the tasks and environments. The reconfigurability needs not only approporiate module structure, but also corresponding mechanism to coordinate the modules' behavior. This paper presents a distributed task coordnation algorithm that combines a set of distributed algorithms for accomplishing global tasks in a modular self-reconfigurable robots. These combined algorithms allow discovering the change of module number in the robot automatically, make all modules to negotiate for solving task conflict by integrating priority scheduling and FIFO, have all the modules collaborate for selecting relevant behavior to finish a given task, and achieve distributed behavior synchronization by decompose the tasks.