Hardwired Pattern Formation by Mobile Robots with Common Unit Distance
This work addresses a new variant of pattern formation for mobile robots, providing theoretical feasibility results and algorithms for different robot capabilities.
The paper introduces the hardwired pattern formation (HwPTF) problem, requiring robots to form a target pattern at a specified size, and shows that two oblivious semi-synchronous robots can solve it without multiplicity, while two oblivious asynchronous robots cannot but can with lights. A size-adjusting algorithm for more than four oblivious semi-synchronous robots is also presented.
The pattern formation (PTF) problem requires mobile robots to form a specified target pattern. Existing papers investigated the PTF problem and revealed the effect of obliviousness and synchronization on distributed coordination of mobile robots. However, the PTF problem allows translation, rotation, and scaling of the target pattern. In this paper, we introduce a novel pattern formation problem, called the hardwired pattern formation (HwPTF) problem that requires the robots to form a given target pattern in a specified size. Although two oblivious semi-synchronous robots cannot solve the HwPTF problem of multiplicity two (i.e., the rendezvous problem), we show that they can solve the HwPTF problem without multiplicity. We also show that two oblivious asynchronous robots equipped with lights can solve the HwPTF problem, while oblivious asynchronous robots cannot. We finally present a size-adjusting algorithm for more than four oblivious semi-synchronous robots, that yields a HwPTF algorithm when combined with some existing pattern formation algorithms.