Abstract
We consider the problem of uniformly dispersing mobile robots in an unknown, connected, and closed space, so as to cover it completely. The robots are autonomous and identical, they enter the space from a single point, and move in coordination with other robots, relying only on sensed local information within a restricted radius. The existing solutions for the problem require either the robots to be synchronous or the space to be without holes and obstacles. In this paper we allow the robots to be fully asynchronous and the space to contain holes. We show how, even in this case, the robots can uniformly fill the unknown space, avoiding any collisions, when endowed with only \(O(1)\) bits of persistent memory and \(O(1)\) visibility radius. Our protocols are asymptotically optimal in terms of visibility and memory requirements, and these results can be achieved without any direct means of communication among the robots.
Research partially supported by NSERC Canada.
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Notes
- 1.
A visibility radius of one means that the robot sees all eight neighboring cells.
- 2.
A communication range of one means that the robot can communicate directly to the robots located in the eight neighboring cells.
- 3.
Except during the process of transferring the leadership as explained later.
- 4.
the blocking robot only takes into account the direction that were still open at the moment it enters in the Blocking state.
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Barrameda, E.M., Das, S., Santoro, N. (2014). Uniform Dispersal of Asynchronous Finite-State Mobile Robots in Presence of Holes. In: Flocchini, P., Gao, J., Kranakis, E., Meyer auf der Heide, F. (eds) Algorithms for Sensor Systems. ALGOSENSORS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8243. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45346-5_17
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