Pattern Formation by Autonomous Mobile Robots

Abstract

A group of mobile autonomous robots, each with very limited capabilities, can form (complex) patterns in the space it occupies. These patterns can be used to program the robots to accomplish high-level tasks (e.g. surrounding and removal of a mine). The basic research questions address which patterns can be formed, and how they can be formed. These questions have been studied mostly from an empirical point of view. Most solutions do not have any guarantee of correctness; actually many solutions never terminate and never form the desired pattern. On the contrary, we are interested in (provably correct) solutions which always form the pattern within finite time. With this goal, we have been studying what patterns can be formed and how; in this paper we describe the results of our investigations.