Evacuating two robots from multiple unknown exits in a circle

Distributed on a unit circle are k exits. Two autonomous mobile robots are placed on the circle. Each robot has a maximum speed of 1 and the robots can communicate wirelessly. The robots have a map of the domain, including exits, but do not have knowledge of their own initial locations on the domain, rather they only know their relative distance. The goal of the evacuation problem is to give an algorithm for the robots which minimizes the time required for both robots to reach an exit, in the worst case. We consider two variations of the problem depending on whether the two robots have control over their initial distance. When the initial distance of the robots is part of the input (i.e. no control), we show that simple algorithms exist which achieve optimal worst case evacuation times for the cases where: the robots begin colocated with an arbitrary distribution of the exits; and when the exits are either colocated or evenly spaced, with arbitrary starting positions of the robots. We...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: ICDCN
• Authors: Jurek Czyzowicz, Stefan Dobrev, Konstantinos Georgiou, Evangelos Kranakis, Fraser MacQuarrie
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCN 2016