Optimal rendezvous on a line by location-aware robots in the presence of spies*

Abstract

A set of mobile robots is placed at arbitrary points of an infinite line. The robots are equipped with GPS devices and they may communicate their positions on the line to a central authority. The collection contains an unknown subset of “spies”, i.e., byzantine robots, which are indistinguishable from the non-faulty ones. The set of the non-faulty robots needs to rendezvous in the shortest possible time in order to perform some task, while the byzantine robots may try to delay their rendezvous for as long as possible. The problem facing a central authority is to determine trajectories for all robots so as to minimize the time until all the non-faulty robots have met. The trajectories must be determined without knowledge of which robots are faulty. Our goal is to minimize the competitive ratio between the time required to achieve the first rendezvous of the non-faulty robots and the time required for such a rendezvous to occur under the assumption that the faulty robots are known at the start. In this paper, we give rendezvous algorithms with bounded competitive ratio, where the central authority is informed only of the set of initial robot positions, without knowing which ones or how many of them are faulty. In general, regardless of the number of faults [Formula: see text] it can be shown that there is an algorithm with bounded competitive ratio. Further, we are able to give a rendezvous algorithm with optimal competitive ratio provided that the number [Formula: see text] of faults is strictly less than [Formula: see text]. Note, however, that in general this algorithm does not give an estimate on the actual value of the competitive ratio. However, when an upper bound on the number of byzantine robots is known to the central authority, we can provide algorithms with constant competitive ratios and in some instances we are able to show that these algorithms are optimal. Moreover, in the cases where the number of faults is either [Formula: see text] or [Formula: see text] we are able to compute the competitive ratio of an optimal rendezvous algorithm, for a small number of robots.