Autonomous Distributed Systems of Mobile Robots

We regard a set of autonomous mobile robots as a distributed system and investigate it from the view of distributed computing. After introducing the model of mobile robot system, we observe that a system of anonymous and memory-less robots can successfully exhibit some autonomous properties such as the self-organization and the self-stability, which are considered to be an important property required for e. g., robust sensor networks. Through the talk, we explore what problems the robots can solve without identifiers and memory, and discuss why they can. We then come up with the fact that molecules can exhibit autonomy without identifiers and memory - a similarity between robots and molecules, which may justify an abuse of our using the robot model as a model of more general distributed systems including e. g., molecular computing.