Conflicting Pattern Formation by Teams of Anonymous, Fully Disoriented Robots

arXiv:2609.23454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Two groups of autonomous, anonymous, and oblivious mobile robots are deployed in the two-dimensional Euclidean plane, each assigned a distinct task. We study a setting where the two groups must simultaneously solve two conflicting pattern formation problems: the extit{gathering problem}, where robots gather at a point not known to them a priori, and the extit{circle formation problem}, where robots occupy distinct positions on the boundary of a circle. Although each robot knows its own task, it cannot identify other members of its group. A prior solution~ite{Conflict-1} addressed this problem for asynchronous robots having {it direction-only axis agreement} and {it global weak multiplicity detection} capability available to all robots in both groups. In contrast, in this work, we consider fully {it disoriented robots} without any axis agreement or common extit{chirality}. We study the feasibility of a solution to this problem for {it disoriented robots}. We propose a distributed algorithm that solves the problem for semi-synchronous disoriented robots with non-rigid movements. Our proposed algorithm assumes global weak multiplicity detection only for the gathering group, while for the circle formation group, it requires local weak multiplicity detection.

Source: arXiv cs.RO | 2026-09-22