Miniaturized surgical devices are promising for the future development of minimally invasive and endoluminal surgery. However, the dexterity and therapeutic functions of these devices are limited. In this paper, a reconfigurable modular robotic system is proposed to perform screening and interventions in the gastrointestinal tract. In the proposed system, millimeter-sized robotic modules are in...

Modular self-reconfigurable robots are drawing increasing interest due to their nature as a versatile, resilient and potentially costeffective tool. Programming modular self-reconfigurable robots is however complicated by the need for closely coordinating the actions of each module with those of its neighbors. In this paper, we investigate the need for a flexible set of concurrency primitives w...

One of the grand challenges of robotics is the design of robots that are adaptive and self-sufficient. This can be crucial for robots exposed to environments that are unstructured (in space and time) or not easily accessible for a human operator, such as the inside of a blood vessel, a collapsed building, the deep sea, or the surface of another planet.Modular reconfigurable robots are among the...

Due to the fast innovation speed in the hardware and software technologies in the field of embedded systems, it becomes more and more necessary to develop applications based on methodologies, which take into account the easiness of future modifications, updates and improvements in the designed system. According to these requirements, this work presents a proposal of environment using reconfigur...

Smart systems and the smart world concept are addressed in the framework of the fourth industrial revolution. New challenges in distributed autonomous robots and computing are considered. An illustration of a new kind of smart and reconfigurable distributed modular robot system is given. A prototype is also presented as well as the associated distributed algorithm.