A Self-Configuration Mechanism for Software Components Distributed in an Ecology of Robots

Distributed heterogeneous robotic systems are often organized in componentbased software architectures. The strong added value of these systems comes from their potential ability to dynamically self-configure the interactions of their components, in order to adapt to new tasks and unforeseen situations. However, no satisfactory solutions exist to the problem of automatic self-configuration. We propose a self-configuration mechanism where a special component generates, establishes and monitors the system configurations. We illustrate our approach on a distributed robotic system, and show an experiment in which the configuration component dynamically changes the configuration in response to a component failure.