Energy-efficient strategies for building short chains of mobile robots locally

Brandes, Philipp; Degener, Bastian; Kempkes, Barbara; Heide, Friedhelm Meyer auf der

doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2012.10.056

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…One of them is the task of straightening a chain of robots in the plane, based on purely local methods; this amounts to our problem for the very special case of a communication graph that is a path, and robots are already sorted by labels. In a considerable sequence of papers, Meyer auf der Heide et al [10]- [22] studied versions of the strategy GO-TO-THE-MIDDLE (GTM), in which each robot moves to the midpoint between its two immediate neighbors. Some of the underlying models are based on discrete rounds, with robots performing (possibly larger) discrete moves; however, Degener et al [14] showed that in a setting with continuous motion and sensing, the variant MOVE-ON-BISECTOR produces a straight, evenly spaced chain in time bounded by O(n); more recently, Brandes et al [22] provided an analysis for continuous GTM and also established an upper bound of O(n) on the distance traveled by a robot, and thus, the overall time.…”

Section: Figmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…All robots that are on the central path straighten the path by following the continuous GTM method, for which it is known that the chain of robots converges to a straight line (up to inaccuracy of measurements) [10]- [22]. The rule is simple: every robot moves towards the midpoint of the segment between its two neighbors n l and n r in the doubly linked list; see Figure 5.…”

Section: Straightening a Pathmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A parallel distributed strategy for arraying a scattered robot swarm

Krupke

Hemmer

McLurkin

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

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Abstract-We consider the problem of organizing a scattered group of n robots in two-dimensional space, with geometric maximum distance D between robots. The communication graph of the swarm is connected, but there is no central authority for organizing it. We want to arrange them into a sorted and equally-spaced array between the robots with lowest and highest label, while maintaining a connected communication network.In this paper, we describe a distributed method to accomplish these goals, without using central control, while also keeping time, travel distance and communication cost at a minimum. We proceed in a number of stages (leader election, initial path construction, subtree contraction, geometric straightening, and distributed sorting), none of which requires a central authority, but still accomplishes best possible parallelization. The overall arraying is performed in O(n) time, O(n 2 ) individual messages, and O(nD) travel distance. Implementation of the sorting and navigation use communication messages of fixed size, and are a practical solution for large populations of low-cost robots.

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Section: Figmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Straightening a Pathmentioning

confidence: 99%

A parallel distributed strategy for arraying a scattered robot swarm

Krupke

Hemmer

McLurkin

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Computing on Rings by Oblivious Robots: A Unified Approach for Different Tasks

et al. 2014

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A set of autonomous robots have to collaborate in order to accomplish a common task in a ring-topology where neither nodes nor edges are labeled (that is, the ring is anonymous). We present a unified approach to solve three important problems: the exclusive perpetual exploration, the exclusive perpetual clearing, and the gathering problems. In the first problem, each robot aims at visiting each node infinitely often while avoiding that two robots occupy a same node (exclusivity property); in exclusive perpetual clearing (also known as searching), the team of robots aims at clearing the whole ring infinitely often (an edge is cleared if it is traversed by a robot or if both its endpoints are occupied); and in the gathering problem, all robots must eventually occupy the same node. We investigate these tasks in the Look-Compute-Move model where the robots cannot communicate but can perceive the positions of other robots. Each robot is equipped with visibility sensors and motion actuators, and it operates in asynchronous cycles. In each cycle, a robot takes a snapshot of the current global configuration (Look), then, based on the perceived configuration, takes a decision to stay idle or to move to one of its adjacent nodes (Compute), and in the latter case it eventually moves to this neighbor (Move). Moreover, robots are endowed with very weak capabilities. Namely, they are anonymous, asynchronous, oblivious, uniform (execute the same algorithm) and have no common sense of orientation. In this setting, we devise algorithms that, starting from an exclusive and rigid (i.e. aperiodic and asymmetric) configuration, solve the three above problems in anonymous ring-topologies.

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