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Towards a General-Purpose, Reversible Language for Controlling Self-reconfigurable Robots

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Book cover Reversible Computation (RC 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7581))

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Abstract

Self-reconfigurable, modular robots are distributed mechatronic devices that can autonomously change their physical shape. Self-reconfiguration from one shape to another is typically achieved through a specific sequence of actuation operations distributed across the modules of the robot. Automatically reversing the sequence of operations brings the robot back to its initial shape, as has been experimentally demonstrated using the DynaRole reversible language. DynaRole however only allows simple sequences of operations to be reversed, which is suitable for reversing self-reconfiguration sequences but lacks the generality needed to implement more complex behaviors.

In this paper we present initial ideas on generalizing the DynaRole language to support a wider range of modular robot control scenarios, while retaining the possibility of reversing distributed sequences. Reversibility is investigated as a practical feature, reducing the programming task of the programmer, and allowing error recovery by backing out of an error state using reverse execution.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Modular Robotics Lab, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

    Ulrik Pagh Schultz

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  1. Ulrik Pagh Schultz
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. DIKU, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 1, 2100, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Robert Glück

  2. Department of Software Engineering, Nanzan University, 489-0863, Seto, Japan

    Tetsuo Yokoyama

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Schultz, U.P. (2013). Towards a General-Purpose, Reversible Language for Controlling Self-reconfigurable Robots. In: Glück, R., Yokoyama, T. (eds) Reversible Computation. RC 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7581. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36315-3_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36315-3_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-36314-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36315-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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