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Self-Organizing Spatial Shapes in Mobile Particles: The TOTA Approach

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3464))

Abstract

We present a programming approach to let a multitude of simple mobile computational “particles” (i.e. sorts of tiny mobile robots) to self-organize their respective locations to assume a coherent global formation (i.e. shape). The problem has a variety of applications in mobile robotics, modular robots, sensor networks, and computational self-assembly. Here we show how the TOTA (“Tuples On The Air”) middleware can be effectively exploited to enable self-organization of spatial shapes in mobile particles with minimal capabilities. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples, spread across the network, to drive particles’ movements and activities. Several experiments are reported showing the effectiveness of the approach.

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Mamei, M., Vasirani, M., Zambonelli, F. (2005). Self-Organizing Spatial Shapes in Mobile Particles: The TOTA Approach. In: Brueckner, S.A., Di Marzo Serugendo, G., Karageorgos, A., Nagpal, R. (eds) Engineering Self-Organising Systems. ESOA 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3464. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11494676_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11494676_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-26180-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31901-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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