Autonomous Mobile Robots: A Distributed Computing Perspective⋆

Abstract. The distributed coordination and control of a team of au-tonomous mobile robots is a problem widely studied in a variety of fields, such as engineering, artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics. Gener-ally, in these areas, the problem is studied mostly from an empirical point of view. Recently, the study of what can be computed by such team of robots has become increasingly popular in theoretical computer science and es-pecially in distributed computing, where it is now an integral part of the investigations on computability by mobile entities [28]. In this paper we describe the current investigations on the algorithmic limitations of what autonomous mobile robots can do with respect to different coordi-nation problems, and overview the main research topics that are gaining attention in this area.