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Circle formation of weak mobile robots

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Published:12 December 2008Publication History
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Abstract

We consider distributed systems made of weak mobile robots, that is, mobile devices, equipped with sensors, that are anonymous, autonomous, disoriented, and oblivious. The Circle Formation Problem (CFP) consists of the design of a protocol insuring that, starting from an initial arbitrary configuration where no two robots are at the same position, all the robots eventually form a regular n-gon—the robots take place on the circumference of a circle C with equal spacing between any two adjacent robots on C.

CFP is known to be unsolvable by arranging the robots evenly along the circumference of a circle C without leaving C—that is, starting from a configuration where the robots are on the boundary of C. We circumvent this impossibility result by designing a scheme based on concentric circles. This is the first scheme that deterministically solves CFP. We present our method with two different implementations working in the semi-synchronous system (SSM) for any number n ≥ 5 of robots.

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