Pinch-Free Orientations of Polyomino Grid Graphs

Overview & Synopsis

We study lattice-based collective construction of a target polyomino on the integer grid, where robots place unit square blocks subject to two physical constraints: the partial structure must remain connected at all times, and no placement may create an unfillable one-cell gap. We present a wavefront sweep algorithm that computes a dependency structure satisfying the local conditions required for safe assembly. Given a list of n cells sorted lexicographically by coordinates, the orientation can be computed in O(n) time using O(n) auxiliary space.