MOBLOT: Molecular oblivious robots

In swarm robotics, research mainly follows a theoretical approach that considers robot systems in the abstract, where the complexity and capabilities of the underlying model are often reduced to their minimum. One general and well-investigated model is OBLOT, where the robots are silent, anonymous, and oblivious. In this work, we introduce MOBLOT, a model that extends OBLOT to address a larger spectrum of cases. MOBLOT stands for molecular oblivious robots: like atoms combine themselves to form molecules, in MOBLOT simple robots can move to form more complex computational units, having an extent and different capabilities with respect to robots; like molecules combine themselves to form the matter, in MOBLOT the complex structures can exploit their own capabilities to arrange themselves to form any shape defining an acceptable final structure. In MOBLOT, we formally define the Matter Formation (MF) problem and, as a preliminary general result, we provide a necessary condition for its solvability which relies on symmetricity. Informally, the symmetricity of a configuration measures the amount of symmetries of the robots' disposal. We actually show how dealing with molecules can resolve in some cases the symmetry breaking issue where OBLOT cannot. Finally, we provide a case study for MOBLOT, that is, a representative MF problem along with a resolution distributed algorithm.