A Domain-Specific Language for Programming Self-Reconfigurable Robots: APGES 2007 - Automatic Program Generation for Embedded Systems - Workshop Proceedings

A self-reconfigurable robot is a robotic device that can change its own shape.
Self-reconfigurable robots are commonly built from multiple identical modules that can
manipulate each other to change the shape of the robot. The robot can also perform tasks
such as locomotion without changing shape. Programming a modular, self-reconfigurable
robot is however a complicated task: the robot is essentially a real-time, distributed
embedded system, where control and communication paths often are tightly coupled to the
current physical configuration of the robot. To facilitate the task of programming
modular, self-reconfigurable robots, we have developed a declarative, role-based
language that allows the programmer to define roles and behavior independently of the
concrete physical structure of the robot. Roles are compiled to mobile code fragments
that distribute themselves over the physical structure of the robot using a dedicated
virtual machine implemented on the ATRON self-reconfigurable robot.