How many oblivious robots can explore a line

Paola Flocchini (1) , David Ilcinkas (2, 3) , Andrzej Pelc (4) , Nicola Santoro (5)

1 SITE - School of Information Technology and Engineering [Ottawa]
2 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
3 CEPAGE - Algorithmics for computationally intensive applications over wide scale distributed platforms
4 DII - Département d'Informatique et d'Ingénierie
5 School of Computer Science [Ottawa]

We 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.

Mots clés: distributed computing; mobile robots; asynchronous; oblivious; exploration; line

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]; Algorithme et structure de données [cs.DS]

Paola Flocchini, David Ilcinkas, Andrzej Pelc, Nicola Santoro. How many oblivious robots can explore a line. Information Processing Letters, 2011, 111 (20), pp.1027-1031. ⟨10.1016/j.ipl.2011.07.018⟩. ⟨hal-00643668⟩