Moving Matter: Using a Single, Simple Robot to Reconfigure a Connected Set of Building Blocks
Abstract
We implement and evaluate different methods for the reconfiguration of a connected arrangement of tiles into a desired target shape, using a single active robot that can move along the tile structure. This robot can pick up, carry, or drop off one tile at a time, but it must maintain a single connected configuration at all times. Becker et al. (CCCG 2025) recently proposed an algorithm that uses histograms as canonical intermediate configurations, guaranteeing performance within a constant factor of the optimal solution if the start and target configuration are well-separated. We implement and evaluate this algorithm, both in a simulated and practical setting, using an inchworm type robot to compare it with two existing heuristic algorithms.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2506.23333,
title = {Moving Matter: Using a Single, Simple Robot to Reconfigure a Connected Set of Building Blocks},
author = {Javier Garcia and Jonas Friemel and Ramin Kosfeld and Michael Yannuzzi and Peter Kramer and Christian Rieck and Christian Scheffer and Arne Schmidt and Harm Kube and Dan Biediger and Sándor P. Fekete and Aaron T. Becker},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.23333},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
8 pages, 12 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the 2025 IEEE 21st International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE 2025)