Efficient Reconfiguration of Tile Arrangements by a Single Active Robot
Abstract
We consider the problem of reconfiguring a two-dimensional connected grid arrangement of passive building blocks from a start configuration to a goal configuration, using a single active robot that can move on the tiles, remove individual tiles from a given location and physically move them to a new position by walking on the remaining configuration. The objective is to determine a schedule that minimizes the overall makespan, while keeping the tile configuration connected. We provide both negative and positive results. (1) We generalize the problem by introducing weighted movement costs, which can vary depending on whether tiles are carried or not, and prove that this variant is NP-hard. (2) We give a polynomial-time constant-factor approximation algorithm for the case of disjoint start and target bounding boxes, which additionally yields optimal carry distance for 2-scaled instances.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.09299,
title = {Efficient Reconfiguration of Tile Arrangements by a Single Active Robot},
author = {Aaron T. Becker and Sándor P. Fekete and Jonas Friemel and Ramin Kosfeld and Peter Kramer and Harm Kube and Christian Rieck and Christian Scheffer and Arne Schmidt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.09299},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
19 pages, 15 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 37th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG 2025)