Approach of Agents with Restricted Fuel Tanks

Abstract

Two mobile agents, modelled as points in the plane moving at speed 1, have to get at a distance at most 1 from each other. This task is known as approach or rendezvous in the plane. An adversary initially places both agents at distinct points, called their bases, at distance at most D, and wakes them up at possibly different times. Each of the agents has a fuel tank that allows them to traverse a trajectory of length D, and can be replenished at the base of the agent. The algorithm of each agent consists of a series of actions which are either moves at a chosen distance in a chosen direction or staying idle for a chosen period of time. For a given instance of the approach task, the execution time of an approach algorithm is the length of the period between the start of the later agent and the moment of approach.
Our goal is to design approach algorithms with optimal time complexity. We consider two independent coherence assumptions. One of them is time coherence, i.e., agents start simultaneously, and the other is orientation coherence: agents have compatible compasses, showing the same North direction. Our main result is establishing optimal time complexity of the approach problem with restricted fuel tanks. It turns out that this optimal complexity heavily depends on the above coherence assumptions. If both of them are satisfied then approach can be performed in time O(D²) and we show that this complexity is optimal. If any of the two coherence assumptions is missing then approach can be performed in time O(D²√D) and we prove that this order of magnitude cannot be improved.
Our main technical contribution are lower bounds showing that, for each of the considered scenarios, our fairly natural approach algorithms are, in fact, optimal.