Discovering and Assessing Fine-Grained Metrics in Robot Networks Protocols

Abstract

The model of autonomous oblivious and anonymous mobile robots recently emerged as an attractive distributed computing abstraction that permits to assess the intrinsic difficulties of many fundamentals tasks, such as exploring or gathering in a discrete space. We present and implement a generic method for obtaining all possible protocols for a swarm of mobile robots operating in a particular discrete space. We use the exclusive perpetual exploration of anonymous rings as a case study. Our method permits to discover new protocols that solve the problem, and to assess specific optimization criteria (such as individual coverage, visits frequency, etc.) that are met by those protocols. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to mechanize the discovery and fine-grained property testing of distributed mobile robot protocols.