Rendezvous and Merging for Two Metamorphic Robotic Systems without Global Compass

TL;DR

This paper presents the first algorithms for rendezvous and merging of two metamorphic robotic systems without a shared coordinate system, demonstrating the necessity of five modules per system for coordination.

Contribution

It introduces the first distributed algorithms for rendezvous and merging of multiple metamorphic robotic systems without a global compass, requiring five modules per system.

Findings

Rendezvous algorithm enables two MRSs to gather with full observation.

Merge algorithm successfully assembles and connects two MRSs after rendezvous.

Five modules per MRS are necessary for solving the coordination problem.

Abstract

A metamorphic robotic system (MRS) consists of anonymous modules, each of which autonomously moves in the 2D square grid by sliding and rotation with keeping connectivity among the modules. Existing literature considers distributed coordination among modules so that they collectively form a single MRS. In this paper, we consider distributed coordination for two MRSs. We first present a rendezvous algorithm that makes the two MRSs gather so that each module can observe all the other modules. Then, we present a merge algorithm that makes the two MRSs assemble and establish connectivity after rendezvous is finished. These two algorithms assume that each MRS consists of five modules, that do not have a common coordinate system. Finally, we show that five modules for each MRS is necessary to solve the rendezvous problem. To the best of our knowledge, our result is the first result on distributed coordination of multiple MRSs.