Autonomous Distributed Systems of Myopic Mobile Robots with Lights

Abstract

The cooperation of swarming autonomous mobile robots has received significant interests in recent years. The common goal of research on it is to clarify the minimum capabilities for robots to achieve a given task. Thus, algorithms for mobile robots have been considered on a theoretical model with negative assumptions about each robot capabilities[4, 6]. Concerning the assumptions, each robot is identical (i.e., all robots run the same algorithm), anonymous (i.e., each robot has no IDs to distinguish two robots), oblivious (i.e., each robot has no memory to record past situation) and silent (i.e., each robot has no direct means of communication). In the initial model described above, because of fundamentally weak capabilities, it is known that most tasks cannot be solved without some additional assumptions even if the model considers the unlimited visibility. However, we may not need to assume completely oblivious robots considering their implementations on real devices because persistent memory is widely available. Thus, recently, luminous robots have attracted attention in order to improve robot capability [1, 7]. A luminous robot maintains a non-volatile visible light, and emits the chosen light color among a set of colors to other robots. That is, a luminous robot uses the light to memorize its state and communicate with other robots. On the other hand, for the assumption of unlimited visibility of the initial model, each robot has a too strong observation device. Therefore, several recent studies focus on myopic robots to consider the implementation of the robot system [2, 3, 5]. A myopic robot has limited visibility, i.e., it can take a snapshot only within a certain fixed distance. In this talk, we consider myopic robots with lights as a more realistic model and briefly show some recent results on the model.