The Arbitrary Pattern Formation problem asks to design a distributed algorithm that allows a set of autonomous mobile robots to form any specific but arbitrary geometric pattern given as input. The problem has been extensively studied in literature in continuous domains. This paper investigates a discrete version of the problem where the robots are operating on a two dimensional infinite grid. The robots are assumed to be autonomous, identical, anonymous and oblivious. They operate in Look-Compute-Move cycles under a fully asynchronous scheduler. The robots do not agree on any common global coordinate system or chirality. We have shown that a set of robots can form any arbitrary pattern, if their starting configuration is asymmetric.
@article{arxiv.1811.00834,
title = {Arbitrary Pattern Formation on Infinite Grid by Asynchronous Oblivious Robots},
author = {Kaustav Bose and Ranendu Adhikary and Manash Kumar Kundu and Buddhadeb Sau},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.00834},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
This is the full version of the paper, with the same title and authors, that was accepted in the 13th International Conference and Workshops on Algorithms and Computation (WALCOM 2019), February 27 - March 02, 2019, Guwahati, India