Leader Election and Gathering for Asynchronous Transparent Fat Robots without Chirality

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deterministic gathering algorithm for asynchronous, transparent fat robots without chirality, including a leader election method to facilitate gathering in complex scenarios.

Contribution

It presents a novel leader election and gathering algorithm for anonymous, chirality-free robots with full visibility and no message passing.

Findings

Deterministic gathering is achievable with the proposed algorithm.

Leader election enables gathering even without chirality.

Conditions where ordering and gathering are impossible are characterized.

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed algorithm which deterministically gathers n (n > 4) asynchronous, fat robots. The robots are assumed to be transparent and they have full visibility. The robots are initially considered to be stationary. A robot is visible in its motion. The robots do not store past actions. They are anonymous and can not be distinguished by their appearances and do not have common coordinate system or chirality. The robots do not communicate through message passing. In the proposed gathering algorithm one robot moves at a time towards its destination. The robot which moves, is selected in such a way that, it will be the only robot eligible to move, until it reaches its destination. In case of a tie, this paper proposes a leader election algorithm which produces an ordering of the robots and the first robot in the ordering becomes the leader. The ordering is unique in the sense that, each robot, characterized by its location, agrees on the same ordering. We show that if a set of robots can be ordered then they can gather deterministically. The paper also characterizes the cases, where ordering is not possible. This paper also presents an important fact that, if leader election is possible then gathering pattern formation is possible even with no chirality.