Efficient scene encoding for programmable matter self-reconfiguration algorithms

Programmable matter can be seen as a huge modular robot in which each module can communicate to its connected neighbors and work all together to achieve a common goal, more likely changing the shape of the whole robot. However, when the number of modules increases, the memory used in each module to store the target shape or the computation time to recreate this shape increases too. This article studies different approaches to describe the shape of any object for huge modular robots. The use of a good method for coding scene is a critical aspect that can reduce the memory, the time of transfer and the energy used in many distributed algorithms like self-reconfiguration. This paper proposes a method called Constructive Solid Geometry for Programmable Matter (CSG4PM), a compact description of an object and all the associated algorithms pre-processing and runtime. CSG4PM is compared to three existing solutions to describe a scene.