Motivated by targeted drug delivery, we investigate the gathering of particles in the full tilt model of externally controlled motion planning: A set of particles is located at the tiles of a polyomino with all particles reacting uniformly to an external force by moving as far as possible in one of the four axis-parallel directions until they hit the boundary. The goal is to choose a sequence of directions that moves all particles to a common position. Our results include a polynomial-time algorithm for gathering in a completely filled polyomino as well as hardness reductions for approximating shortest gathering sequences and for determining whether the particles in a partially filled polyomino can be gathered. We pay special attention to the impact of restricted geometry, particularly polyominoes without holes. As a corollary, we make progress on an open question from Balanza-Martinez et al., SODA 2020 by showing that deciding whether a given position can be occupied remains NP-hard in polyominoes without holes. Our results build on a connection we establish between tilt models and the theory of synchronizing automata.
Fekete et al. (Thu,) studied this question.