Publications Repository - Gdańsk University of Technology

A robot modeled as a deterministic finite automaton has to build a structure from material available to it. The robot navigates in the infinite oriented grid $Z x Z$. Some cells of the grid are full (contain a brick) and others are empty. The subgraph of the grid induced by full cells, called the {\em field}, is initially connected. The (Manhattan) distance between the farthest cells of the field is called its {\em span}. The robot starts at a full cell. It can carry at most one brick at a time. At each step it can pick a brick from a full cell, move to an adjacent cell and drop a brick at an empty cell. The aim of the robot is to construct the most compact possible structure composed of all bricks, i.e., a {\em nest}. That is, the robot has to move all bricks in such a way that the span of the resulting field be the smallest. Our main result is the design of a deterministic finite automaton that accomplishes this task and subsequently stops, for every initially connected field, in time $O(sz)$, where $s$ is the span of the initial field and $z$ is the number of bricks. We show that this complexity is optimal.

Authors

• Jurek Czyzowicz,
• prof. dr hab. inż. Dariusz Dereniowski link open in new tab ,
• Andrzej Pelc