The Mutual Visibility Problem for Fat Robots

Abstract

Given a set of n ≥ 1 unit disk robots in the Euclidean plane, we consider the fundamental problem of providing mutual visibility to them: the robots must reposition themselves to reach a configuration where they all see each other. This problem arises under obstructed visibility, where a robot cannot see another robot if there is a third robot on the straight line segment between them. This problem was solved by Sharma et al. [17] in the luminous robots model, where each robot is equipped with an externally visible light that can assume colors from a fixed set of colors, using 9 colors and O(n) rounds. In this work, we present an algorithm that requires only 3 colors and O(n) rounds.