Efficiently Reconfiguring a Connected Swarm of Labeled Robots

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Fekete, Sándor P., Kramer, Peter, Rieck, Christian, Scheffer, Christian, Schmidt, Arne
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2022
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author Fekete, Sándor P.
Kramer, Peter
Rieck, Christian
Scheffer, Christian
Schmidt, Arne
author_facet Fekete, Sándor P.
Kramer, Peter
Rieck, Christian
Scheffer, Christian
Schmidt, Arne
contents When considering motion planning for a swarm of $n$ labeled robots, we need to rearrange a given start configuration into a desired target configuration via a sequence of parallel, collision-free robot motions. The objective is to reach the new configuration in a minimum amount of time; an important constraint is to keep the swarm connected at all times. Problems of this type have been considered before, with recent notable results achieving constant stretch for not necessarily connected reconfiguration: If mapping the start configuration to the target configuration requires a maximum Manhattan distance of $d$, the total duration of an overall schedule can be bounded to $\mathcal{O}(d)$, which is optimal up to constant factors. However, constant stretch could only be achieved if disconnected reconfiguration is allowed, or for scaled configurations (which arise by increasing all dimensions of a given object by the same multiplicative factor) of unlabeled robots. We resolve these major open problems by (1) establishing a lower bound of $Ω(\sqrt{n})$ for connected, labeled reconfiguration and, most importantly, by (2) proving that for scaled arrangements, constant stretch for connected reconfiguration can be achieved. In addition, we show that (3) it is NP-complete to decide whether a makespan of 2 can be achieved, while it is possible to check in polynomial time whether a makespan of 1 can be achieved.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2209_11028
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficiently Reconfiguring a Connected Swarm of Labeled Robots
Fekete, Sándor P.
Kramer, Peter
Rieck, Christian
Scheffer, Christian
Schmidt, Arne
Computational Geometry
Data Structures and Algorithms
Robotics
F.2.2
When considering motion planning for a swarm of $n$ labeled robots, we need to rearrange a given start configuration into a desired target configuration via a sequence of parallel, collision-free robot motions. The objective is to reach the new configuration in a minimum amount of time; an important constraint is to keep the swarm connected at all times. Problems of this type have been considered before, with recent notable results achieving constant stretch for not necessarily connected reconfiguration: If mapping the start configuration to the target configuration requires a maximum Manhattan distance of $d$, the total duration of an overall schedule can be bounded to $\mathcal{O}(d)$, which is optimal up to constant factors. However, constant stretch could only be achieved if disconnected reconfiguration is allowed, or for scaled configurations (which arise by increasing all dimensions of a given object by the same multiplicative factor) of unlabeled robots. We resolve these major open problems by (1) establishing a lower bound of $Ω(\sqrt{n})$ for connected, labeled reconfiguration and, most importantly, by (2) proving that for scaled arrangements, constant stretch for connected reconfiguration can be achieved. In addition, we show that (3) it is NP-complete to decide whether a makespan of 2 can be achieved, while it is possible to check in polynomial time whether a makespan of 1 can be achieved.
title Efficiently Reconfiguring a Connected Swarm of Labeled Robots
topic Computational Geometry
Data Structures and Algorithms
Robotics
F.2.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11028