A survey on pattern formation of autonomous mobile robots: asynchrony, obliviousness and visibility

A robot system consists of autonomous mobile robots each of which repeats LookCompute-Move cycles, where the robot observes the positions of other robots (Look phase), computes the track to the next location (Compute phase), and moves along the track (Move phase). In this survey, we focus on self-organization of mobile robots, especially their power of forming patterns. The formation power of a robot system is the class of patterns that the robots can form, and existing results show that the robot system’s formation power is determined by their asynchrony, obliviousness, and visibility. We briefly survey existing results, with impossibilities and pattern formation algorithms. Finally, we present several open problems related to the pattern formation problem of mobile robots.