Distributed Anonymous Mobile Robots: Formation of Geometric Patterns
SIAM Journal on Computing
ICTCS '01 Proceedings of the 7th Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science
Agreement on a Common X - Y Coordinate System by a Group of Mobile Robots
Intelligent Robots: Sensing, Modeling and Planning [Dagstuhl Workshop, September 1-6, 1996]
Fault-tolerant gathering algorithms for autonomous mobile robots
SODA '04 Proceedings of the fifteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Solving the robots gathering problem
ICALP'03 Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Automata, languages and programming
Convergence of autonomous mobile robots with inaccurate sensors and movements
STACS'06 Proceedings of the 23rd Annual conference on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science
On the feasibility of gathering by autonomous mobile robots
SIROCCO'05 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Structural Information and Communication Complexity
Static and expanding grid coverage with ant robots: Complexity results
Theoretical Computer Science
Multi-agent Cooperative Cleaning of Expanding Domains
International Journal of Robotics Research
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A number of recent studies address systems of mobile autonomous robots from a distributed computing point of view. Although such systems employ robots that are relatively weak and simple (i.e., dimensionless, oblivious and anonymous), they are nevertheless expected to have strong fault tolerance capabilities as a group. This paper studies the partitioning problem, where n robots must divide themselves into k size-balanced groups, and examines the impact of common orientation on the solvability of this problem. First, deterministic crash-fault tolerant algorithms are given for the problem in the asynchronous full-compass and semi-synchronous half-compass models, and a randomized algorithm is given for the semi-synchronous no-compass model. Next, the role of common orientation shared by the robots is examined. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the partitioning problem to be solvable are given in the different timing models. Finally, the problem is proved to be unsolvable in the no-compass asynchronous model.