Circle Formation by Asynchronous Fat Robots with Limited Visibility

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed algorithm for circle formation by multiple autonomous mobile robots. The vision of each robot is limited to a maximum distance. The robots do not store past actions or records of past data. They are anonymous and cannot be distinguished by their appearances. All robots agree on a common origin and axes. Earlier works report algorithms for gathering of multiple autonomous mobile robots in limited visibility considering the robots to be dimensionless or points. This paper models a robot as a unit disc (fat robot). The algorithm presented in this paper also assures that there is no collision among the robots. The robots do not share a common clock. They execute the algorithm asynchronously.