Abstract

We study the Rendezvous problem for two autonomous mobile robots in asynchronous settings with persistent memory called light. It is well known that Rendezvous is impossible in a basic model when robots have no lights, even if the system is semi-synchronous. On the other hand, Rendezvous is possible if robots have lights of various types with a constant number of colors. If robots can observe not only their own lights but also other robots' lights, their lights are called full-light. If robots can only observe the state of other robots' lights, the lights are called external-light. This paper focuses on robots with external-lights in asynchronous settings and a particular class of algorithms called L-algorithms, where an L-algorithm computes a destination based only on the current colors of observable lights. When considering L-algorithms, Rendezvous can be solved by robots with full-lights and three colors in general asynchronous settings (called ASYNC) and the number of colors is optimal under these assumptions. In contrast, there exist no L-algorithms in ASYNC with external-lights regardless of the number of colors.
In this paper, extending the impossibility result, we show that there exist no L-algorithms in so-called LC-1-Bounded ASYNC with external-lights regardless of the number of colors, where LC-1-Bounded ASYNC is a proper subset of ASYNC and other robots can execute at most one Look operation between the Look operation of a robot and its subsequent Compute operation. We also show that LC-1-Bounded ASYNC is the minimal subclass in which no L-algorithms with external-lights exist. That is, Rendezvous can be solved by L-algorithms using external-lights with a finite number of colors in LC-0-Bounded ASYNC (equivalently LC-atomic ASYNC). Furthermore, we show that the algorithms are optimal in the number of colors they use.

@InProceedings{okumura_et_al:LIPIcs:2018:10084,
  author =	{Takashi Okumura and Koichi Wada and Xavier D{\'e}fago},
  title =	{{Optimal Rendezvous L-Algorithms for Asynchronous Mobile Robots with External-Lights}},
  booktitle =	{22nd International Conference on Principles of Distributed  Systems (OPODIS 2018)},
  pages =	{24:1--24:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-098-9},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2018},
  volume =	{125},
  editor =	{Jiannong Cao and Faith Ellen and Luis Rodrigues and Bernardo Ferreira},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2018/10084},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-100843},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2018.24},
  annote =	{Keywords: Autonomous mobile robots, Rendezvous, Lights, L-algorithms}
}