Mutual Visibility by Fat Robots with Slim Omnidirectional Camera

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed algorithm for autonomous fat robots with omnidirectional cameras to achieve mutual visibility and leader election in semi-synchronous settings, considering realistic sensing constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel algorithm addressing mutual visibility for fat robots with slim cameras, incorporating leader election under realistic sensing assumptions.

Findings

Algorithm is proven correct in semi-synchronous setting.

Leader election is successfully implemented for fat robots.

Addresses practical sensing limitations in robot visibility models.

Abstract

In the existing literature of the Mutual Visibility problem for autonomous robot swarms, the adopted visibility models have some idealistic assumptions that are not consistent with practical sensing device implementations. This paper investigates the problem in the more realistic visibility model called opaque fat robots with slim omnidirectional camera. The robots are modeled as unit disks, each having an omnidirectional camera represented as a disk of smaller size. We assume that the robots have compasses that allow agreement in the direction and orientation of both axes of their local coordinate systems. The robots are equipped with visible lights which serve as a medium of communication and also as a form of memory. We present a distributed algorithm for the Mutual Visibility problem which is provably correct in the semi-synchronous setting. Our algorithm also provides a solution for Leader Election which we use as a subroutine in our main algorithm. Although Leader Election is trivial with two axis agreement in the full visibility model, it is challenging in our case and is of independent interest.