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Brief Announcement: The Virtue of Self-Consistency

Authors Fabian Frei , Koichi Wada

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computer systems organization → Robotic autonomy
Keywords
  • Autonomous Mobile Robots
  • Distinct Gathering
  • Round Robin
  • Disorientation
  • Self-Consistency

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Abstract

We show that self-consistency can be a crucial property for autonomous mobile robots. 
Specifically, we consider the task of gathering three robots, placed adversarially in distinct locations in the Euclidean plane, in a single point. We assume the natural scheduler RoundRobin, which activates the robots in turns. An activated robot perceives all robot locations in an adversarially scaled, rotated, and mirrored Cartesian coordinate system with itself at the origin and then moves wherever it wants. We show that this task cannot be solved in the default robot model (without any consistency guarantees and no multiplicity detection) but becomes feasible if we assume self-consistency (i.e., no changes between the different activations of the same robot) of either the unit length (i.e., no scaling) or the compass (i.e., no rotating) by providing explicit algorithms.

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Fabian Frei and Koichi Wada. Brief Announcement: The Virtue of Self-Consistency. In 39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 356, pp. 57:1-57:7, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.57

Author Details

Fabian Frei
  • CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Koichi Wada
  • Hosei University, Koganei, Tokyo, Japan

Funding

  • Frei, Fabian: This research was funded in part by grant number 218001 awarded to Fabian Frei by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
  • Wada, Koichi: Supported by JSPS KAKENHI No. 25K03079.

Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. The work by Fabian Frei was done in part while at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarbrücken.

References

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