The cost of probabilistic agreement in oblivious robot networks

In this paper, we look at the time complexity of two agreement problems in networks of oblivious mobile robots, namely, at the gathering and scattering problems. Given a set of robots with arbitrary initial location and no initial agreement on a global coordinate system, gathering requires that all robots reach the exact same but not predetermined location. In contrast, scattering requires that no two robots share the same location. These ractions are fundamental coordination problems in cooperative mobile robotics. Oblivious solutions are appealing for self-stabilization since they are self-stabilizing at no extra cost. As neither gathering nor scattering can be solved deterministically under arbitrary schedulers, probabilistic solutions have been proposed recently. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we propose a detailed time complexity analysis of a modified probabilistic gathering algorithm. Using Markov chains tools and additional assumptions on the environment, w...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IPL
• Authors: Julien Clement, Xavier Défago, Maria Gradinariu Potop-Butucaru, Taisuke Izumi, Stéphane Messika
• Keywords: IPL 2010, Robots, Scattering, Time Complexity