MVGS: A new graph signature for self-reconfiguration planning of modular robots based on Multiple Views Theory

•A new graph signature for self-reconfiguration planning of modular robots is proposed.•The Multi-View Graph Signature (MVGS) is inspired from Multiple Views Theory.•A new similarity metric between two configuration graphs is proposed based on MVGS.•The approach is evaluated on reconfiguration planning of M-TRAN and SuperBot modules.•Results show the approach performs significantly much better than the previous works.

Self-reconfiguration planning (SRP) of modular robots has been a major research for the past decade and still is a key issue. In this paper, we present a novel new graph signature approach for SRP based on Multiple Views Theory, called MVGSMVGS (Multi-View Graph Signature). In the proposed method the time complexity of the graph signature generation reduced to O(logn)O(logn), in which nn is the number of modules, from the best solutions with O(n2)O(n2). Also, we propose a new similarity metric, between graph signatures to better guide the heuristic search toward the final configuration. The proposed approach has been implemented in a simulator and the results show significantly better performance than the other previously proposed methods.