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Fault-Induced Dynamics of Oblivious Robots on a Line

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Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10616))

Abstract

The study of computing in presence of faulty robots in the Look-Compute-Move model has been the object of extensive investigation, typically with the goal of designing algorithms tolerant to as many faults as possible. In this paper, we initiate a new line of investigation on the presence of faults, focusing on a rather different issue. We are interested in understanding the dynamics of a group of robots when they execute an algorithm designed for a fault-free environment, in presence of some undetectable crashed robots. We start this investigation focusing on the classic point-convergence algorithm by Ando et al. [2] for robots with limited visibility, in a simple setting (which already presents serious challenges): the robots operate fully synchronously on a line, and at most two of them are faulty. Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, the presence of faults induces the robots to perform some form of scattering, rather than point-convergence. In fact, we discover that they arrange themselves inside the segment delimited by the two faults in interleaved sequences of equidistant robots.

This work has been supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada through the Discovery Grant program; by Prof. Flocchini’s University Research Chair.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We write \(f(t) \sim g(t)\) whenever \(\lim _{t\rightarrow \infty } \frac{f(t)}{g(t)} = 1\).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

    Jean-Lou De Carufel & Paola Flocchini

Authors
  1. Jean-Lou De Carufel
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  2. Paola Flocchini
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Correspondence to Jean-Lou De Carufel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Paul Spirakis

  2. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Philippas Tsigas

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De Carufel, JL., Flocchini, P. (2017). Fault-Induced Dynamics of Oblivious Robots on a Line. In: Spirakis, P., Tsigas, P. (eds) Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems. SSS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10616. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69084-1_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69084-1_9

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