We consider an
ecology of robots in which robots can help each
other by offering information-producing functionalities. A functional
configuration of this ecology is a way to allocate and connect
functionalities among the participating robots. In general, different
configurations can be used to solve the same task, depending on the
current situation, and some tasks require sequences of different
configurations to be solved. In this paper, we propose a plan-based
approach to automatically generate a preferred configuration for a given
task, environment, and set of resources. We also describe how our
configuration planner can be integrated with an action planner to deal
with tasks that require sequences of configurations. We illustrate
these ideas on a specific instance of an ecology of robots, called a
PEIS-Ecology. We also show an
experiment run on our PEIS Ecology testbed, in which a sequence of
configurations for an olfactory task is automatically generated and
executed.