A robot-swarm impossibility result: for homogeneous differential-drive robots that are memoryless, non-communicating, and equipped only with a binary line-of-sight sensor, no bimodal (reactive) controller can guarantee aggregation of every initial configuration for a general number of robots. The proof reasons about the geometric structure of the four-dimensional controller space; the paper also corrects the classical two-robot aggregation proof and gives an alternative controller with a rigorous convergence argument.
This paper resolves an open problem in swarm robotics: whether a memoryless, non-computing controller can make an arbitrary number of differential-drive robots aggregate (gather without a pre-agreed …