A Survey on Gathering of Distributed Mobile Agent in Discrete Domain

Abstract

This paper presents a survey on gathering problem of a set of autonomous programmable mobile agents popularly known as robot swarm, moving on discrete plane, i.e. along the ages of a graph and gather at a particular node. The mobile agents are distributed in nature, i.e. they are not controlled by any centralized authority. The main objective of these robots is to execute a job in a collaborative manner. Gathering is one form of such coordination problems. Gathering of swarm robots is a very popular field of research in swarm robotics where the researchers have addressed the problem through artificial intelligence aspects. Many popular simulations and heuristics have been developed for swarm robots considering the learning capabilities of the robots. There also exists a parallel theoretical field of swarm robotics which studies deterministic algorithms for the swarm robots. This field is more interested about the feasibility and solvability of a problem along with algorithm analysis. In this paper, we are going to explore these theoretical studies on gathering problem.