Fast and robust self-organization for micro-electro-mechanical robotic systems

Microrobots are low-power and low-capacity memory devices that can sense and act. They perform various missions and tasks in a wide range of applications including odor localization, firefighting, medical service, surveillance and security, search and rescue. To achieve these tasks nodes should reconfigure their physical topology to another target organization. The self-organization is one of the most challenging tasks in MEMS applications. In this paper, we propose a distributed and efficient parallel self-organization protocol for chains of MEMS nodes. This protocol is memory-efficient because it does not use the predefined positions of the target shape, which reduces the memory usage to a constant complexity. Our algorithm is implemented in a real environment simulator called DPRSim, the Dynamic Physical Rendering Simulator. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.