Distributed multimedia applications are very sensitive to resource variations. An attractive way for dealing with dynamic resource variations consists in making applications adaptive, and even self-adaptive. The objective is to grant applications the ability to observe themselves and their environment, to detect significant changes and to adjust their behavior accordingly. This issue has been t...

The goal of optimal reconfiguration planning (ORP) is to find a shortest reconfiguration sequence to transform a modular and reconfigurable robot from an arbitrary configuration into another. This paper investigates this challenging problem for chain-typed robots based on graph representations and presents a series of theoretical results: (1) A formal proof that this is a NP-complete problem, (...

FPGAs can perform better than ASICs if the logic mapped onto them is optimized for each problem instance. Unfortunately, this advantage is often canceled by the long time needed by CAD tools to generate problem instance dependent logic and the time required to configure the FPGAs. In this paper, a novel approach for runtime mapping is proposed that utilizes self-reconfigurability of multicontex...

Collective displacement is a very useful behaviour for living creatures. This behaviour can appear in a flock of birds, a school of fish, or a swarm of insects. Flocking behaviour is a common demonstration of the power of simple rules in collective displacement emergence by (Reynolds, 2007). The study of the displacement of a robot in an unknown universe is a traditional subject of robotics (Fr...

External actuation in self-reconfigurable modular robots promises to allow modules to shrink down in size. Synchronous external motions promise to allow fast convergence and assembly times. XBot is a modular system that uses synchronous external actuation, but has a limited range of reachable configurations stemming from a single motion primitive of a module rotating about another. This paper p...

Self-assembling multi-robot systems can, in theory, overcome the physical limitations of individual robots by connecting to each other to form particular physical structures (morphologies) relevant to specific tasks. Here, we show for the first time how robots in a real-world multi-robot system can autonomously self-assemble into and reconfigure between arbitrary morphologies. We use a distribu...

Akiya KAMIMURA, Satoshi MURATA, Eiichi YOSHIDA, Haruhisa KUROKAWA, Kohji TOMITA and Shigeru KOKAJI *1 Distributed System Design Research Group, Intelligent Systems Institute, AIST 1-2-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, 305-8564 Japan {kamimura.a, e.yoshida, kurokawa-h, k.tomita, s.kokaji}@aist.go.jp *2 Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science, Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science an...

Reconfigurable Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) architectures consist of microprocessors and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). In order to implement runtime reconfigurable systems, these SoC devices combine the ease of programmability and the flexibility that FPGAs provide. One representative of these is the new Xilinx Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP), which integrates a dual-core AR...