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Certified Impossibility Results for Byzantine-Tolerant Mobile Robots

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Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS 2013)

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Abstract

We propose a framework to build formal developments for robot networks using the Coq proof assistant, to state and prove formally various properties. We focus in this paper on impossibility proofs, as it is natural to take advantage of the Coq higher order calculus to reason about algorithms as abstract objects. We present in particular formal proofs of two impossibility results for convergence of oblivious mobile robots if respectively more than one half and more than one third of the robots exhibit Byzantine failures, starting from the original theorems by Bouzid et al.. Thanks to our formalisation, the corresponding Coq developments are quite compact. To our knowledge, these are the first certified (in the sense of formally proved) impossibility results for robot networks.

This work was supported in part by the Digiteo Île-de-France project Pactole 2009-38HD. A preliminary version of this work appears as a 2-pages Brief Announcement in DISC 2013.

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Auger, C., Bouzid, Z., Courtieu, P., Tixeuil, S., Urbain, X. (2013). Certified Impossibility Results for Byzantine-Tolerant Mobile Robots. In: Higashino, T., Katayama, Y., Masuzawa, T., Potop-Butucaru, M., Yamashita, M. (eds) Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems. SSS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8255. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03089-0_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03089-0_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-03088-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-03089-0

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