Position discovery for a system of bouncing robots
Journal article, 2015

A collection of n anonymous mobile robots is deployed on a unit-perimeter ring or a unit-length line segment. Every robot starts moving at constant speed, and bounces each time it meets any other robot or segment endpoint, changing its walk direction. We study the problem of position discovery, in which the task of each robot is to detect the presence and the initial positions of all other robots. The robots cannot communicate or perceive information about the environment in any way other than by bouncing nor they have control over their walks which are determined by their initial positions and their starting directions. Each robot has a clock allowing it to observe the times of its bounces. We give complete characterizations of all initial configurations for both the ring and the segment in which no position detection algorithm exists and we design optimal position detection algorithms for all feasible configurations.

Robots

Algorithms

Computing

Mobile

Complexity

Detection

Position

Distributed

Author

Jurek Czyzowicz

Université du Québec

Leszek A. Ga̧sieniec

University of Liverpool

Adrian Kosowski

Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique

Evangelos Kranakis

Carleton University

Oscar Morales

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Networks and Systems (Chalmers)

E. Pacheco

Carleton University

Information and Computation

0890-5401 (ISSN) 1090-2651 (eISSN)

Vol. 244 122-133

Subject Categories

Computer Vision and Robotics (Autonomous Systems)

DOI

10.1016/j.ic.2015.07.005

More information

Latest update

9/18/2019