Deterministic Symmetry Breaking in Ring Networks

We study a distributed coordination mechanism for uniform agents located on a circle. The agents perform their actions in synchronised rounds. At the beginning of each round an agent chooses the direction of its movement from clockwise, anticlockwise, or idle, and moves at unit speed during this round. Agents are not allowed to overpass, i.e., when an agent collides with another it instantly starts moving with the same speed in the opposite direction (without exchanging any information with the other agent). However, at the end of each round each agent has access to limited information regarding its trajectory of movement during this round. We assume that $n$ mobile agents are initially located on a circle unit circumference at arbitrary but distinct positions unknown to other agents. The agents are equipped with unique identifiers from a fixed range. The {\em location discovery} task to be performed by each agent is to determine the initial position of every other agent. Our main result states that, if the only available information about movement in a round is limited to %information about distance between the initial and the final position, then there is a superlinear lower bound on time needed to solve the location discovery problem. Interestingly, this result corresponds to a combinatorial symmetry breaking problem, which might be of independent interest. If, on the other hand, an agent has access to the distance to its first collision with another agent in a round, we design an asymptotically efficient and close to optimal solution for the location discovery problem.Comment: Conference version accepted to ICDCS 201

Gathering on Rings for Myopic Asynchronous Robots With Lights

We investigate gathering algorithms for asynchronous autonomous mobile robots moving in uniform ring-shaped networks. Different from most work using the Look-Compute-Move (LCM) model, we assume that robots have limited visibility and lights. That is, robots can observe nodes only within a certain fixed distance, and emit a color from a set of constant number of colors. We consider gathering algorithms depending on two parameters related to the initial configuration: M_{init}, which denotes the number of nodes between two border nodes, and O_{init}, which denotes the number of nodes hosting robots between two border nodes. In both cases, a border node is a node hosting one or more robots that cannot see other robots on at least one side. Our main contribution is to prove that, if M_{init} or O_{init} is odd, gathering is always feasible with three or four colors. The proposed algorithms do not require additional assumptions, such as knowledge of the number of robots, multiplicity detection capabilities, or the assumption of towerless initial configurations. These results demonstrate the power of lights to achieve gathering of robots with limited visibility

Optimal torus exploration by oblivious robots

International audienceWe deal with a team of autonomous robots that are endowed with motion actuators and visibility sensors. Those robots are weak and evolve in a discrete environment. By weak, we mean that they are anonymous, uniform, unable to explicitly communicate, and oblivious. We first show that it is impossible to solve the terminating exploration of a simple torus of arbitrary size with less than 4 or 5 such robots, respectively depending on whether the algorithm is probabilistic or deterministic. Next, we propose in the SSYNC model a probabilistic solution for the terminating exploration of torus-shaped networks of size ℓ×L, where 7≤ℓ≤L, by a team of 4 such weak robots. So, this algorithm is optimal w.r.t. the number of robots

Optimal Torus Exploration by Oblivious Robots

International audienceWe consider autonomous robots that are endowed with motion actuators and visibility sensors. The robots we consider are weak, i.e., they are anonymous, uniform, unable to explicitly communicate, and oblivious (they do not remember any of their past actions). In this paper, we propose an optimal (w.r.t. the number of robots) solution for the terminating exploration of a torus-shaped network by a team of $k$ such robots. In more details, we first show that it is impossible to explore a simple torus of arbitrary size with (strictly) less than four robots, even if the algorithm is probabilistic. If the algorithm is required to be deterministic, four robots are also insufficient. This negative result implies that the only way to obtain an optimal algorithm (w.r.t. the number of robots participating to the algorithm) is to make use of probabilities. Then, we propose a probabilistic algorithm that uses four robots to explore all simple tori of size $\ell \times L$, where $7 \leq \ell \leq L$. Hence, in such tori, four robots are necessary and sufficient to solve the (probabilistic) terminating exploration. As a torus can be seen as a 2-dimensional ring, our result shows, perhaps surprisingly, that increasing the number of possible symmetries in the network (due to increasing dimensions) does not come at an extra cost w.r.t. the number of robots that are necessary to solve the problem

How many oblivious robots can explore a line

International audienceWe consider the problem of exploring an anonymous line by a team of k identical, oblivious, asynchronous deterministic mobile robots that can view the environment but cannot communicate. We completely characterize sizes of teams of robots capable of exploring a n-node line. For k= 5, or k=4 and n is odd. For all values of k for which exploration is possible, we give an exploration algorithm. For all others, we prove an impossibility result

Terminating Exploration Of A Grid By An Optimal Number Of Asynchronous Oblivious Robots

International audienceWe consider swarms of asynchronous oblivious robots evolving into an anonymous grid-shaped network. In this context, we investigate optimal (w.r.t. the number of robots) deterministic solutions for the terminating exploration problem. We first show lower bounds in the semi-synchronous model. Precisely, we show that at least three robots are required to explore any grid of at least three nodes, even in the probabilistic case. Then, we show that at least four (resp. five) robots are necessary to deterministically explore a (2,2)-Grid (resp. a (3,3)-Grid). We then propose deterministic algorithms in the asynchronous model. This latter being strictly weakest than the semi-synchronous model, all the aforementioned bounds still hold in that context. Our algorithms actually exhibit the optimal number of robots that is necessary to explore a given grid. Overall, our results show that except in two particular cases, three robots are necessary and sufficient to deterministically explore a grid of at least three nodes and then terminate. The optimal number of robots for the two remaining cases is four for the (2,2)-Grid and five for the (3,3)-Grid, respectively

Gathering in Dynamic Rings

The gathering problem requires a set of mobile agents, arbitrarily positioned at different nodes of a network to group within finite time at the same location, not fixed in advanced. The extensive existing literature on this problem shares the same fundamental assumption: the topological structure does not change during the rendezvous or the gathering; this is true also for those investigations that consider faulty nodes. In other words, they only consider static graphs. In this paper we start the investigation of gathering in dynamic graphs, that is networks where the topology changes continuously and at unpredictable locations. We study the feasibility of gathering mobile agents, identical and without explicit communication capabilities, in a dynamic ring of anonymous nodes; the class of dynamics we consider is the classic 1-interval-connectivity. We focus on the impact that factors such as chirality (i.e., a common sense of orientation) and cross detection (i.e., the ability to detect, when traversing an edge, whether some agent is traversing it in the other direction), have on the solvability of the problem. We provide a complete characterization of the classes of initial configurations from which the gathering problem is solvable in presence and in absence of cross detection and of chirality. The feasibility results of the characterization are all constructive: we provide distributed algorithms that allow the agents to gather. In particular, the protocols for gathering with cross detection are time optimal. We also show that cross detection is a powerful computational element. We prove that, without chirality, knowledge of the ring size is strictly more powerful than knowledge of the number of agents; on the other hand, with chirality, knowledge of n can be substituted by knowledge of k, yielding the same classes of feasible initial configurations

Self-Stabilizing Robots in Highly Dynamic Environments

International audienceThis paper deals with the classical problem of exploring a ring by a cohort of synchronous robots. We focus on the perpetual version of this problem in which it is required that each node of the ring is visited by a robot infinitely often.The challenge in this paper is twofold. First, we assume that the robots evolve in a highly dynamic ring, i.e., edges may appear and disappear unpredictably without any recurrence nor periodicity assumption. The only assumption we made is that each node is infinitely often reachable from any other node. Second, we aim at providing a self-stabilizing algorithm to the robots, i.e., the algorithm must guarantee an eventual correct behavior regardless of the initial state and positions of the robots. Our main contribution is to show that this problem is deterministically solvable in this harsh environment by providing a self-stabilizing algorithm for three robots