Algorithms for mobile agents, autonomous robots, and sensor networks

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Originating from fields as diverse as AI, robotics, and software engineering,  the research area on  autonomous mobile  entities  focuses on computational entities capable of moving over  a network (e.g., mobile software agents) or a terrain (e.g., autonomous robots or mobile sensors). This area has seen a rapid growth of interest. On one hand,  the use of mobile agents is becoming increasingly popular when computing in networked environments, ranging from Internet to the Data Grid, both as a theoretical paradigm and as a system-supported programming platform. On the other hand, the theoretical and algorithmic  study of autonomous robots is now even more important considering  the link with a network of mobile sensors. From   computational and   algorithmic viewpoints, research on mobile agents, on autonomous robots (and especially on mobile sensor networks) is still at a very early stage. Theoretical frameworks are vague and sometimes missing, algorithmic techniques and tools   are primitive.  To start covering this lack of theoretical and algorithmic background,  this project focuses on computational and algorithmic issues arising  in systems of mobile entities. The main goals are: to reach a better understanding of the computational power of mobile entities (i.e., what tasks can be performed by the entities, under what conditions, and at what cost), and to design efficient algorithms for solving basic coordination, control, and security problems. Both the computational and the algorithmic tasks will be studied also in presence of possibly unsafe components in the environments (faults, harmful elements). In particular,  in the case of mobile agents  the project  considers situations when some  of the hosts are harmful (e.g., host attack), and when an unwanted intruder  is moving   in the network(e.g., a spyware or a virus).  In the first case,  the goal of the agents is to localize the harmful host trying not to be  damaged by it, in the second case, it is to capture the intruder. In the case of robots, the project focuses on computability issues and on the   design of coordination   algorithms, under different assumptions on the capabilities of the robots; particular emphasis and focus is on applications in the  context of  mobile sensor networks.