Publisher Copyright: © 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

We present a distributed framework for predicting whether a planned reconfiguration step of a modular robot will mechanically overload the structure, causing it to break or lose stability under its own weight. The algorithm is executed by the modular robot itself and based on a distributed iterative solution of mechanical equilibrium equations derived from a simplified model of the robot. The model treats intermodular connections as beams and assumes no-sliding contact between the modules and the ground. We also provide a procedure for simplified instability detection. The algorithm is verified in the Programmable Matter simulatorVisibleSim, and in real-life experiments on the modular robotic systemBlinky Blocks.

Module localization is an important aspect of the operation of self-reconfigurable robots. The knowledge of spatial positions of modules, or at least of the overall shape which the modules form, is the usual prerequisite for reconfiguration planning. We present a general, decentralized algorithm for determining the positions of modules placed on a cubic grid from local sensor information. The connection topology of the robot is arbitrary. We assume that a module can sense the presence of its immediate neighbors on the grid and determine their positions in its own local coordinate system, but cannot sense the orientations of the coordinate systems of its neighbors. Since orientation cannot be directly communicated between modules, the modules can only exchange information about the relative positions of their neighbors. The algorithm aggregates this information over the entire network of modules and narrows down the set of valid positions for each module as far as possible. If there exists a unique locally-consistent assignment of coordinates to all modules then it is found.