Assembling of Robots in Presence of Line Obstacles with Direction-only Axes Agreement

Abstract

Abstract This paper addresses the problem of assembling semi-synchronous oblivious robots in presence of horizontal line obstacles under direction only axes agreement model. In this article, a distributed algorithm is proposed for a swarm of autonomous mobile robots that are required to assemble over the boundaries of a rectangular bounded region within a finite amount of time. The robots are initially deployed randomly within the region and assumed to support the non-rigid motion. All the line-shaped obstacles are randomly scattered within the region and are assumed to be positioned horizontally, parallel to the top and bottom boundaries of the rectangular region. Though the robots are assumed to have unlimited visibility, these opaque obstacles restrict their vision. The existing solution to this problem assumes full axes agreement among the robots, whereas, the proposed solution assumes direction only axis agreement, a much weaker model. Our proposed algorithm is fault-tolerant and supports the collision-free movement of the robots. It successfully assembles robots on the left and right boundaries of the region.