Distributed Anonymous Mobile Robots: Formation of Geometric Patterns
SIAM Journal on Computing
Self-stabilization
Cooperative Mobile Robotics: Antecedents and Directions
Autonomous Robots
Reliable Real-Time Communication in Cooperative Mobile Applications
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Collective and Cooperative Group Behaviors: Biologically Inspired Experiments in Robotics
The 4th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics IV
Distributed reconfiguration of metamorphic robot chains
Distributed Computing
Gathering of asynchronous robots with limited visibility
Theoretical Computer Science
Solving the robots gathering problem
ICALP'03 Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Automata, languages and programming
Gathering asynchronous mobile robots with inaccurate compasses
OPODIS'06 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Principles of Distributed Systems
On the feasibility of gathering by autonomous mobile robots
SIROCCO'05 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Structural Information and Communication Complexity
Using eventually consistent compasses to gather memory-less mobile robots with limited visibility
ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)
Randomized Gathering of Mobile Robots with Local-Multiplicity Detection
SSS '09 Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems
How to gather asynchronous oblivious robots on anonymous rings
DISC'12 Proceedings of the 26th international conference on Distributed Computing
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This paper considers two asynchronous identical mobile robots in an environment devoid of any landmarks or common coordinate system. The robots, executing their own instance of the same algorithm, must cooperate to end up at the exact same location (not predetermined) within a finite time. The problem, known as gathering, is the simplest form of spontaneous agreement that can be reached between the robots. This simple problem is however notoriously impossible with two such robots. Surprisingly, the problem was shown to be solvable for three robots or more, adding a weak assumption to help break any potential symmetry in the system. Prior work has shown that the problem could be solved by letting each robot have access to some compass, provided that the divergence between the compasses is at most 45°. The question remained open, however, as to whether the problem could still be solved with a larger divergence. In this paper, we present a distributed algorithm that solves the gathering problem with two asynchronous robots, when their compasses can differ by any angle less than 180°, which is obviously the largest divergence for which the compasses can still bring any useful information.