Self-Stabilizing Mobile Robot Formations With Virtual Nodes

In this paper, the authors describe how virtual infrastructure can be used to coordinate the motion of mobile robots in a 2-dimensional plane in the presence of dynamic changes in the underlying mobile ad hoc net-work, i.e., nodes joining, leaving, or failing. The mobile robots cooperate to implement a VSA Layer, in which a Virtual Stationary Automaton (VSA) is associated with each region of the plane. The VSAs coordinate among them to distribute the robots as needed throughout the plane. The resulting motion coordination protocol is self-stabilizing, in that each robot can begin the execution in any arbitrary state and at any arbitrary location in the plane.