Gathering asynchronous swarm robots under nonuniform limited visibility

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed algorithm for gathering a group of autonomous, homogeneous, oblivious, asynchronous mobile robots having limited visibility (sensing) ranges. To the best of our knowledge, all reported results have assumed that the visibility ranges are uniform for all the robots. In contrast, we consider that the visibility ranges of the robots are not uniform. Moreover, the robots have no knowledge about the visibility ranges of other robots. However, a lower bound on the visibility range of all the robots is known to all the robots.