Optimal Rendezvous ${\mathcal L}$-Algorithms for Asynchronous Mobile Robots with External-Lights

TL;DR

This paper investigates the rendezvous problem for asynchronous mobile robots with external-lights, establishing the minimal number of colors needed for optimal L-algorithms and demonstrating their limitations.

Contribution

It introduces a subclass of asynchronous models where rendezvous with external-lights is possible and proves the optimality of the number of colors used in L-algorithms.

Findings

Rendezvous is solvable with full-lights and 3 colors in asynchronous settings.

No L-algorithms with external-lights are possible in general asynchronous models.

The paper establishes the minimal number of colors needed for external-light L-algorithms in a specific asynchronous subclass.

Abstract

We study the Rendezvous problem for 2 autonomous mobile robots in asynchronous settings with persistent memory called light. It is well known that Rendezvous is impossible in a basic model when robots have no lights, even if the system is semi-synchronous. On the other hand, Rendezvous is possible if robots have lights of various types with a constant number of colors. If robots can observe not only their own lights but also other robots' lights, their lights are called full-light. If robots can only observe the state of other robots' lights, the lights are called external-light. In this paper, we focus on robots with external-lights in asynchronous settings and a particular class of algorithms (called L-algorithms), where an L-algorithm computes a destination based only on the current colors of observable lights. When considering L-algorithms, Rendezvous can be solved by robots with full-lights and 3 colors in general asynchronous settings (called ASYNC) and the number of colors is optimal under these assumptions. In contrast, there exists no L-algorithms in ASYNC with external-lights regardless of the number of colors. In this paper, we consider a fairly large subclass of ASYNC in which Rendezvous can be solved by L-algorithms using external-lights with a finite number of colors, and we show that the algorithms are optimal in the number of colors they use.