Uniform Scattering of Robots on Alternate Nodes of a Grid

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed, oblivious algorithm enabling autonomous robots to evenly scatter on alternate nodes of a grid, ensuring collision-free and deadlock-free distribution for area coverage.

Contribution

It presents a novel distributed algorithm for uniform robot scattering on grid nodes without communication, applicable to autonomous, oblivious robots.

Findings

Robots achieve uniform distribution on alternate grid nodes.

The algorithm guarantees collision-free and deadlock-free operation.

Robots operate under semi-synchronous, anonymous, and oblivious conditions.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm to uniformly scatter the robots along a grid, with robots on alternate nodes of this grid distribution. These homogeneous, autonomous mobile robots place themselves equidistant apart on the grid, which can be required for guarding or covering a geographical area by the robots. The robots operate by executing cycles of the states "look-compute-move". In the look phase, it looks to see the position of the other robots; in the compute phase, it computes a destination to move to; and then in the move phase, it moves to that computed destination. They do not interact by message passing and can recollect neither the past actions nor the looked data from the previous cycle, i.e., oblivious. The robots are semi-synchronous, anonymous and have unlimited visibility. Eventually, the robots uniformly distribute themselves on alternate nodes of a grid, leaving the adjacent nodes of the grid vacant. The algorithm presented also assures no collision or deadlock among the robots.