Line Formation by Fat Robots under Limited Visibility

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel distributed algorithm enabling fat, autonomous robots with limited visibility to form a straight line without collision, despite lacking global coordinates or communication.

Contribution

It presents the first algorithm for line formation by fat robots with limited visibility, addressing collision avoidance and autonomous movement without global knowledge.

Findings

Algorithm guarantees collision-free line formation.

Robots operate without global coordinate system.

First reported result for fat robots under limited visibility.

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed algorithm for a set of tiny unit disc shaped robot to form a straight line. The robots are homoge- neous, autonomous, anonymous. They observe their surrounding up to a certain distance, compute destinations to move to and move there. They do not have any explicit message sending or receiving capability. They forget their past observed or computed data. The robots do not have any global coordinate system or origin. Each robot considers its position as its origin. However, they agree on the X and Y axis. The robots are not aware of the total number of robots in the system. The algorithm presented in this paper assures collision free movements of the robots. To the best of our knowledge this paper is the first reported result on line formation by fat robots under limited visibility.