Reconfiguration of Squares Using a Constant Number of Moves Each

Authors: Thijs van der Horst, Maarten Löffler, Tim Ophelders, Tom Peters

Multi-robot motion planning is a hard problem. We investigate restricted variants of the problem where square robots are allowed to slide over an arbitrary curve to a new position only a constant number of times each. We show that the problem remains NP-hard in most cases, except when the squares have unit size and when the problem is unlabeled, i.e., the location of each square in the target configuration is left unspecified.