  Since it has often been claimed by academics that reconfiguration is
essential, many approaches to reconfiguration, especially of robotic systems,
have been developed. Accordingly, the literature on robotics is rich in
techniques for reconfiguring robotic systems. However, when talking to
researchers in the domain, there seems to be no common understanding of what
exactly reconfiguration is and how it relates to other concepts such as
adaptation. Beyond this academic perspective, robotics frameworks provide
mechanisms for dynamically loading and unloading parts of robotics
applications. While we have a fuzzy picture of the state-of-the-art in robotic
reconfiguration from an academic perspective, we lack a picture of the
state-of-practice from a practitioner perspective. To fill this gap, we survey
the literature on reconfiguration in robotic systems by identifying and
analyzing 98 relevant papers, review how four major robotics frameworks support
reconfiguration, and finally investigate the realization of reconfiguration in
48 robotics applications. When comparing the state-of-the-art with the
state-of-practice, we observed a significant discrepancy between them, in
particular, the scientific community focuses on complex structural
reconfiguration, while in practice only parameter reconfiguration is widely
used. Based on our observations, we discuss possible reasons for this
discrepancy and conclude with a takeaway message for academics and
practitioners interested in robotics.
