An empirical study of the performance of active self-assembly

Several approaches have been proposed recently for building shapes with swarms of self-assembling robots. However, there is a dearth of information about the performance of each approach, and how to compare them. This paper considers the active self-assembly scheme introduced by Arbuckle and Requicha, and investigates its performance through extensive simulations. The difficulties encountered in the evaluation of self-assembly schemes are discussed. Empirical simulation data are presented that show that the time for completion of the boundary of a polygon by the active self-assembly scheme is approximately linear in the size of the polygon, for the range of parameters investigated.