Ring Exploration with Oblivious Myopic Robots

TL;DR

This paper investigates the problem of exploring an anonymous ring with identical, oblivious, asynchronous robots that have limited visibility, demonstrating conditions under which exploration is still achievable.

Contribution

It introduces the exploration problem with myopic robots having limited visibility and analyzes the conditions for successful exploration in an anonymous ring.

Findings

Exploration is possible with visibility up to 3 nodes.

Limited visibility imposes computational constraints.

The study identifies specific conditions enabling exploration with myopic robots.

Abstract

The exploration problem in the discrete universe, using identical oblivious asynchronous robots without direct communication, has been well investigated. These robots have sensors that allow them to see their environment and move accordingly. However, the previous work on this problem assume that robots have an unlimited visibility, that is, they can see the position of all the other robots. In this paper, we consider deterministic exploration in an anonymous, unoriented ring using asynchronous, oblivious, and myopic robots. By myopic, we mean that the robots have only a limited visibility. We study the computational limits imposed by such robots and we show that under some conditions the exploration problem can still be solved. We study the cases where the robots visibility is limited to 1, 2, and 3 neighboring nodes, respectively.