How many oblivious robots can explore a line
We consider the problem of exploring an anonymous line by a team of k identical, oblivious, asynchronous deterministic mobile robots that can view the environment but cannot communicate. We completely characterize sizes of teams of robots capable of exploring an n-node line. For k  = 5, or k = 4 and n is odd. For all values of k for which exploration is possible, we give an exploration algorithm. For all others, we prove an impossibility result. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
oblivious exploration line asynchronous mobile robots distributed computing