Uniform Circle Formation By Oblivious Swarm Robots

TL;DR

This paper presents novel distributed algorithms enabling homogeneous, oblivious swarm robots to form a uniform circle, even under limited visibility and non-transparent conditions, ensuring collision-free and deadlock-free operation.

Contribution

It introduces the first algorithms for uniform circle formation by fat robots under both transparent and non-transparent, limited visibility models.

Findings

Algorithms are correct and guarantee collision avoidance.

Algorithms work under both transparent and non-transparent robot models.

The approach is applicable to real-world boundary surveillance tasks.

Abstract

In this paper, we study the circle formation problem by multiple autonomous and homogeneous disc-shaped robots (also known as fat robots). The goal of the robots is to place themselves on the periphery of a circle. Circle formation has many real-world applications, such as boundary surveillance. This paper addresses one variant of such problem { uniform circle formation, where the robots have to be equidistant apart. The robots operate by executing cycles of the states wait-look-compute-move. They are oblivious, indistinguishable, anonymous, and do not communicate via message passing. First, we solve the uniform circle formation problem while assuming the robots to be transparent. Next, we address an even weaker model, where the robots are non-transparent and have limited visibility. We propose novel distributed algorithms to solve these variants. Our presented algorithms in this paper are proved to be correct and guarantee to prevent collision and deadlock among the swarm of robots.