Line Formation by Fat Robots under Limited Visibility

Abstract: This paper proposes a distributed algorithm for a set of tiny unit disc shaped robot to form a straight line. The robots are homoge- neous, autonomous, anonymous. They observe their surrounding up to a certain distance, compute destinations to move to and move there. They do not have any explicit message sending or receiving capability. They forget their past observed or computed data. The robots do not have any global coordinate system or origin. Each robot considers its position as its origin. However, they agree on the X and Y axis. The robots are not aware of the total number of robots in the system. The algorithm presented in this paper assures collision free movements of the robots. To the best of our knowledge this paper is the first reported result on line formation by fat robots under limited visibility.