Distributed circle formation for anonymous oblivious robots

Abstract

This paper deals with systems of multiple mobile robots each of which observes the positions of the other robots and moves to a new position so that eventually the robots form a circle. In the model we study, the robots are anonymous and oblivious, in the sense that they cannot be distinguished by their appearance and do not have a common x-y coordinate system, while they are unable to remember past actions. We propose a new distributed algorithm for circle formation on the plane. We prove that our algorithm is correct and provide an upper bound for its performance. In addition, we conduct an extensive and detailed comparative simulation experimental study with the DK algorithm described in [7]. The results show that our algorithm is very simple and takes con-siderably less time to execute than algorithm DK. © Springer-Verlag 2004.