Tutorial 1-4: A Self-stabilizing Marching Algorithm for a Group of Oblivious Robots

We propose a decentralized motion planning algorithm for a group of autonomous robots in an obstacle-free workspace. The task of the robots is to transport a polygonal object (which may be an imaginary one in marching), where each robot holds the object at the corner. Given the current and the goal positions of the robots, each robot independently computes a next position in a memoryless manner that the computation is fully independent of the past history of their motions. Then each robot tries to move the new position for a unit of time, and repeats this cycle until it reaches the goal position. The objective of our research is to develop a motion planning algorithm which simultaneously guarantees self-stability and smoothness of motion; each robot finally reaches its goal position under an assumption that finite number of transient and sensor errors occur, and the formation of the robots is maintained so as to be reasonably similar to that of the goal position. In this talk, we demonstrate the proposed algorithm by simulations.