Byzantine-Resilient Convergence in Oblivious Robot Networks

Given a set of robots with arbitrary initial location and no agreement on a global coordinate system, convergence requires that all robots asymptotically approach the exact same, but unknown beforehand, location. Robots are oblivious— they do not recall the past computations — and are allowed to move in a one-dimensional space. Additionally, robots cannot communicate directly, instead they obtain system related information only via visual sensors. We draw a connection between the convergence problem in robot networks, and the distributed approximate agreement problem (that requires correct processes to decide, for some constant ǫ, values distance ǫ apart and within the range of initial proposed values). Surprisingly, even though specifications are similar, the convergence implementation in robot networks requires specific assumptions about synchrony and Byzantine resilience. In more details, we prove necessary and sufficient conditions for the convergence of mobile robots desp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICDCN
• Authors: Zohir Bouzid, Maria Gradinariu Potop-Butucaru, Sébastien Tixeuil
• Keywords: Convergence, Distributed Computing, ICDCN 2009, Robot Networks, Robots