Arbitrary Pattern Formation on Infinite Grid by Asynchronous Oblivious Robots

Abstract

The Arbitrary Pattern Formation problem asks to design a distributed algorithm that allows a set of autonomous mobile robots to form any specific but arbitrary geometric pattern given as input. The problem has been extensively studied in literature in continuous domains. This paper investigates a discrete version of the problem where the robots are operating on a two dimensional infinite grid. The robots are assumed to be autonomous, identical, anonymous and oblivious. They operate in Look-Compute-Move cycles under a fully asynchronous scheduler. The robots do not agree on any common global coordinate system or chirality. We have shown that a set of robots can form any arbitrary pattern, if their starting configuration is asymmetric.