Robot Based Computing System: An Educational Experience

Robot based computing systems have been widely investigated in the last years. One of the main issues is to solve global tasks by means of local and simple computations. Robots might be cooperative or competitive, still the algorithm designer has to detect a way to accomplish the desired task. In this paper, we propose a platform made up of small and self-propelled robots with very limited capabilities in terms of computing resources, storage and sensing. In particular, we consider cheap robots moving within a confined area. The area is suitably coloured so as to be able for a robot endowed with a light sensor to reasonably detect its position. Moreover, robots can communicate with each other by exchanging short messages. Based only on those weak capabilities, we show how it is possible to realise interesting basic tasks. Apart for the relevance in educational contexts, our platform also represents an interesting case study for the main question posed in the literature about the minimal settings under which interesting tasks can be distributively solved.