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Autonomous Mobile Robots: A Distributed Computing Perspective

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Algorithms for Sensor Systems (ALGOSENSORS 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 8243))

Abstract

The distributed coordination and control of a team of autonomous mobile robots is a problem widely studied in a variety of fields, such as engineering, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics. Generally, in these areas, the problem is studied mostly from an empirical point of view.

Recently, the study of what can be computed by such team of robots has become increasingly popular in theoretical computer science and especially in distributed computing, where it is now an integral part of the investigations on computability by mobile entities [28]. In this paper we describe the current investigations on the algorithmic limitations of what autonomous mobile robots can do with respect to different coordination problems, and overview the main research topics that are gaining attention in this area.

This research is supported in part by MIUR of Italy under project ARS TechnoMedia.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    e.g. because of limits to the robot’s motorial capabilities.

  2. 2.

    Note that this does not mean that the observing robot can distinguish a moving robot from a non moving one.

  3. 3.

    If the diameter is not fixed a priori, the problem becomes trivial, even in Async: each robot computes the smallest circle enclosing all the robots’ positions and moves on the circumference of such a circle.

  4. 4.

    Notice that Rendezvous has a trivial solution in Fsync: a robot moves to the halfway point to the other robot. In both Ssync  [57] and Async  [13], this move-to-half strategy guarantees only convergence.

  5. 5.

    The tilted compasses are said to be fully variable if the actual tilt of each compass may vary at any time (but always with no more than \(\phi \) from the global coordinate system); they are semi-variable if the tilt of each compass may vary (but no more than \(\phi \)) between successive cycles, but it does not change during a cycle.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Paola Flocchini and Nicola Santoro for their help and suggestions in the preparation of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Giuseppe Prencipe

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  1. Giuseppe Prencipe
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Correspondence to Giuseppe Prencipe .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Paola Flocchini

  2. Stony Brook University, Stonybrook, New York, USA

    Jie Gao

  3. School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Evangelos Kranakis

  4. University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide

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Prencipe, G. (2014). Autonomous Mobile Robots: A Distributed Computing Perspective. In: Flocchini, P., Gao, J., Kranakis, E., Meyer auf der Heide, F. (eds) Algorithms for Sensor Systems. ALGOSENSORS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8243. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45346-5_2

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