Distributed heterogeneous robotic systems are often organized in component-based software architectures. The strong added value of these systems comes from their potential ability to dynamically self-configure the interactions of their components, in order to adapt to new tasks and unforeseen situations. However, no satisfactory solutions exist to the problem of automatic self-configuration. We propose a self-configuration mechanism where a special component generates, establishes and monitors the system configurations. We illustrate our approach on a distributed robotic system, and show an experiment in which the configuration component dynamically changes the configuration in response to a component failure.