Energy-aware parallel self-reconfiguration for chains microrobot networks

• We present a parallel and energy-ware protocol for self-reconfiguration of microrobots.
• From chains configurations to squares configurations.
• This protocol is efficient and scalable because it is map-less.
• This protocol needs a constant complexity of memory usage.
• Evaluation is made with the Dynamic Physical Rendering Simulator.

MEMS microrobots are miniaturized electro-mechanical elements, made using the techniques of micro-fabrication. They have limited energy capacity and low memory space. Self-reconfiguration is required for MEMS microrobots to complete their mission and/or to optimize their communication. In this paper, we present a self-reconfiguration protocol from a straight chain to square organization, which deals with MEMS microrobots characteristics. In the proposed protocol, nodes do not have the map of their target positions which makes the protocol portable, standalone, and the memory complexity is bounded by a constant. This paper improves a former solution by using parallelism in the movements of microrobots to optimize the time and the number of movements and by making the algorithm energy-aware. So each node is aware of the amount of energy that it will spend, which will improve the energy consumption. Our algorithm is implemented in Meld, a declarative language, and executed in a real environment simulator called DPRSim.