Quantitative comparison of self-reconfiguration algorithms for 3D Catoms

Modular self-reconfigurable robots can be used to build objects either by filling the space entirely with robots (densely packed) or by constructing a hollow internal structure (scaffolding) and coating the outside. Scaffolding offers many advantages for building an object versus a densely packed representation. However, the different approaches have never been compared. In this article, we define and evaluate metrics for comparing scaffolding algorithms and we test them on three existing scaffolding algorithms.