Ring Exploration with Myopic Luminous Robots

TL;DR

This paper studies how limited visibility and minimal light colors affect the ability of autonomous robots to explore ring networks, establishing the minimal number of robots needed under various synchrony models.

Contribution

It provides the first tight bounds on the number of myopic luminous robots required for exploration in ring networks across different synchrony models.

Findings

Two and three robots suffice for perpetual and terminating exploration in fully synchronous models.

Three and four robots are necessary and sufficient in semi-synchronous and asynchronous models.

Lights with two colors significantly reduce the number of robots needed compared to no lights.

Abstract

We investigate exploration algorithms for autonomous mobile robots evolving in uniform ring-shaped networks. Different from the usual Look-Compute-Move (LCM) model, we consider two characteristics: myopia and luminosity. Myopia means each robot has a limited visibility. We consider the weakest assumption for myopia: each robot can only observe its neighboring nodes. Luminosity means each robot maintains a non-volatile visible light. We consider the weakest assumption for luminosity: each robot can use only two colors for its light. The main interest of this paper is to clarify the impact of luminosity on exploration with myopic robots. As a main contribution, we prove that 1) in the fully synchronous model, two and three robots are necessary and sufficient to achieve perpetual and terminating exploration, respectively, and 2) in the semi-synchronous and asynchronous models, three and four robots are necessary and sufficient to achieve perpetual and terminating exploration, respectively. These results clarify the power of lights for myopic robots since, without lights, five robots are necessary and sufficient to achieve terminating exploration in the fully synchronous model, and no terminating exploration algorithm exists in the semi-synchronous and asynchronous models. We also show that, in the fully synchronous model (resp., the semi-synchronous and asynchronous models), the proposed perpetual exploration algorithm is universal, that is, the algorithm solves perpetual exploration from any solvable initial configuration with two (resp., three) robots and two colors. On the other hand, we show that, in the fully synchronous model (resp., the semi-synchronous and asynchronous models), no universal algorithm exists for terminating exploration, that is, no algorithm may solve terminating exploration from any solvable initial configuration with three (resp., four) robots and two colors.