Flocking along line by autonomous oblivious mobile robots

Abstract

Swarm robot is a collection of tiny identical autonomous mobile robots who collaboratively perform a given task. One of the main objectives of swarm robots is to place themselves on a geographic region forming a particular geometric pattern in order to execute some jobs in cooperation, e.g., covering or guarding a region, moving a big object. This paper proposes a deterministic distributed algorithm for a set of tiny disc shaped swarm robots (also known as fat robots) to form a straight line and then moving this line by coordinating the motion of the robots. This phenomenon of moving of robots while maintaining the straight line formation, is known as Flocking of robots. The robots are homogeneous, autonomous, anonymous. They need very less computational power. They sense their surrounding, compute destinations to move to and move there. They do not have any explicit message sending or receiving capability. They forget their past sensed and computed data. The robots do not agree on any global coordinate system or origin. The robots are not aware of the total number of robots in the system. All these disabilities of the robots make them less expensive in cost as well as simple in software and hardware requirements. The algorithm presented in this paper assures collision free movements of the robots.