Budget-Constrained Fault-Tolerant Mutual Visibility for Autonomous Robots under the Mobility Fault Model

Abstract:We investigate the mutual visibility problem for a swarm of $n\ge3$ autonomous mobile robots under the budget-constrained mobility fault model. The robots are opaque, so if three robots are collinear, the middle robot obstructs the visibility between the other two. Each robot is assigned a finite movement budget, reflecting its limited energy, that bounds the total distance it may traverse during the execution. Moreover, an arbitrary number of robots may become permanently immobile due to mobility faults. The objective is to design a distributed algorithm that enables the non-faulty robots to coordinate their movements so that, within a finite time, every non-faulty robot attains unobstructed visibility of all robots in the system, including the faulty ones, while respecting the prescribed movement budget. We consider luminous robots operating under the $\mathsf{SSYNC}$ model with non-rigid movements, without any agreement on their local coordinate systems, and equipped only with a {\it common fixed reference point}. We present a deterministic distributed algorithm that solves the problem despite an arbitrary number of mobility faults. The algorithm guarantees mutual visibility for the non-faulty robots, respects the movement budget of every robot, provides collision-free movements for the robots, and uses only 12 light colors.

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Computational Geometry (cs.CG); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.04402 [cs.DC]

(or arXiv:2610.04402v1 [cs.DC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.04402 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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