Energy-aware parallel self-reconfiguration for chains microrobot networks

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*mictordbots charatteriStics. In the proposettprotticol, 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. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.