In this paper we assume, that the robots move using jointcontrol
locomotion. The proposed planning system is therefore
suitable for robots without self-reconfiguration capabilities, like
swimming robots or snake-like robots. The system can be extended
to use self-reconfiguration of modular robots. In such a case,
some of the motion primitives realize the reconfiguration to new
shapes [17–22]. As the reconfiguration changes shapes of the
robots, the motion primitives realizing joint-control locomotion
need to be optimized also for the newly created shapes, which
can be time consuming. To be able to keep the amount of possible
robotic shapes low, and therefore to be able to optimize motion
primitives for each shape in a short time, only reconfiguration
leading to suitable shapes should be preferred. The methods for
reconfiguration planning as well as methods to determine quality
of newly generated robotic shapes are beyond the scope of this
paper and these will be investigated in our future work.