Related papers: Optimal competitive online ray search with an erro…
In search problems, a mobile searcher seeks to locate a target that hides in some unknown position of the environment. Such problems are typically considered to be of an on-line nature, in that the input is unknown to the searcher, and the…
We consider three related problems of robot movement in arbitrary dimensions: coverage, search, and navigation. For each problem, a spherical robot is asked to accomplish a motion-related task in an unknown environment whose geometry is…
Though competitive analysis is often a very good tool for the analysis of online algorithms, sometimes it does not give any insight and sometimes it gives counter-intuitive results. Much work has gone into exploring other performance…
We revisit the problem of searching for a target at an unknown location on a line when given upper and lower bounds on the distance D that separates the initial position of the searcher from the target. Prior to this work, only asymptotic…
In the setting of online algorithms, the input is initially not present but rather arrive one-by-one over time and after each input, the algorithm has to make a decision. Depending on the formulation of the problem, the algorithm might be…
Assume that a target is known to be present at an unknown point among a finite set of locations in the plane. We search for it using a mobile robot that has imperfect sensing capabilities. It takes time for the robot to move between…
We consider the problem of searching for rays (or lines) in the half-plane. The given problem turns out to be a very natural extension of the cow-path problem that is lifted into the half-plane and the problem can also directly be motivated…
We study a variant of the searching problem where the environment consists of a known terrain and the goal is to obtain visibility of an unknown target point on the surface of the terrain. The searcher starts on the surface of the terrain…
Cooperation between mobile robots and wireless sensor networks is a line of research that is currently attracting a lot of attention. In this context, we study the following problem of barrier coverage by stationary wireless sensors that…
We study the Symmetric Rendezvous Search Problem for a multi-robot system. There are $n>2$ robots arbitrarily located on a line. Their goal is to meet somewhere on the line as quickly as possible. The robots do not know the initial location…
In the freeze-tag problem, one active robot must wake up many frozen robots. The robots are considered as points in a metric space, where active robots move at a constant rate and activate other robots by visiting them. In the…
This paper studies some basic problems in a multiple-object auction model using methodologies from theoretical computer science. We are especially concerned with situations where an adversary bidder knows the bidding algorithms of all the…
The multiple-path orienteering problem asks for paths for a team of robots that maximize the total reward collected while satisfying budget constraints on the path length. This problem models many multi-robot routing tasks such as exploring…
The problem of adversarial multi-robot patrol has gained interest in recent years, mainly due to its immediate relevance to various security applications. In this problem, robots are required to repeatedly visit a target area in a way that…
We study the problem of online unweighted bipartite matching with $n$ offline vertices and $n$ online vertices where one wishes to be competitive against the optimal offline algorithm. While the classic RANKING algorithm of Karp et al.…
We revisit the linear search problem where a robot, initially placed at the origin on an infinite line, tries to locate a stationary target placed at an unknown position on the line. Unlike previous studies, in which the robot travels along…
We consider online algorithms under both the competitive ratio criteria and the regret minimization one. Our main goal is to build a unified methodology that would be able to guarantee both criteria simultaneously. For a general class of…
In the online metric bipartite matching problem, we are given a set $S$ of server locations in a metric space. Requests arrive one at a time, and on its arrival, we need to immediately and irrevocably match it to a server at a cost which is…
We consider the problem of walking in an unknown street, for a robot that has a minimal sensing capability. The robot is equipped with a sensor that only detects the discontinuities in depth information (gaps) and can locate the target…
In the problem of online load balancing on uniformly related machines with bounded migration, jobs arrive online one after another and have to be immediately placed on one of a given set of machines without knowledge about jobs that may…