Uniform dispersal of asynchronous finite-state mobile robots in presence of holes

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. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.