Circle formation by asynchronous transparent fat robots

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed algorithm for circle formation by a system of mobile robots. Each robot observes the positions of other robots and moves to a new position. Eventually they form a circle. The robots do not store past actions. They are anonymous and cannot be distinguished by their appearance and do not have a common coordinate system (origin and axis) and chirality (common handedness). Most of the earlier works assume the robots to be dimensionless (points). In this paper a robot is represented as a unit disc (fat robot). The robots are assumed to be transparent in order to achieve full visibility. However, a robot is considered as a physical obstacle for another robot. The robots execute the algorithm asynchronously. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.