A Distributed Algorithm for Un-balanced Partitioning of a Swarm of Autonomous Mobile Robots and Its Performance Analysis

This piece of work studies the partitioning problem on independently operating swarm of autonomous mobile robots and devises algorithms for unbalanced partitioning in a distributed computing environment. The robots considered here are all identical and are very simple and weak. There is no central control over the robots and the robots do not communicate among themselves. Each robot executes the same algorithm based on their local information. This paper frames the algorithms for unbalanced partitioning by sorting the robots based on their ranking and then allocating them in different groups based on their ranks, such that N robots are divided into K unbalanced groups of unequal robots in each group. This paper also presents the performance based analysis of the un-balanced algorithm U_PART over the balanced algorithm and examines their effects via different examples through 50 separate test cases. It also tries to bring out the shortcomings of the proposed U_PART algorithm and proposes another alternative approach towards un-balanced partitioning to overcome the limitation of the U_PART algorithm.