Computation Under Restricted Visibility

摘要

In a swarm of robots, each robot has certain capabilities to perform their computations to achieve a global objective. One such capability is the sensing capability, known as vision. This enables a robot to sense the positions of the other robots in the system. The sensing capability may be restricted by two factors: (ⅰ) the sensing range and (ⅱ) the opacity of the robots. The sensing range may be limited or unlimited and the robots may be transparent or opaque. When robots have limited sensing range, a robot can sense all the robots within a fixed radius around it. If three opaque robots are collinear, the middle robot obstructs the vision of the two other robots. This chapter deals with these two constraints on the vision of the robots. A model with such a constraint is referred to as the restricted visibility model. This chapter presents different geometric formation problems for swarm robots under the restricted visibility model.