Reconfiguration-Complete Motion Primitives with Constructive Planning for Deformable Planar Modular Robots
TL;DR
This letter introduces a square-cell abstraction that maps deformable rhombus modules to fixed-size grid cells while retaining physically interpretable local motions through two primitives, pivoting and shearing, and proves that every non-straight edge-connected configuration can be transformed to a fixed canonical staircase.
Abstract
The continuously deformable geometry of modular robots makes it difficult to define a fixed representation for reconfiguration planning and analysis. This letter introduces a square-cell abstraction that maps deformable rhombus modules to fixed-size grid cells while retaining physically interpretable local motions through two primitives, pivoting and shearing. Under this abstraction, we prove that every non-straight edge-connected configuration with $N \geq 7$ can be transformed to a fixed canonical staircase using only admissible primitive motions. Since these motions are reversible, any two configurations in this class are mutually reconfigurable. The proof is constructive and directly yields a staircase-canonicalization planner that transports removable boundary modules while preserving connectivity. As a practical enhancement, we further introduce a boundary-to-delivery lookahead selector that ranks admissible high level choices without affecting the completeness guarantee. Experiments demonstrate the constructive reconfiguration process and show that the selector substantially reduces planning time, while reference comparisons indicate lower planning times than the prior framework over the shared module counts.