Closure and Convergence: A Foundation of Fault-Tolerant Computing
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering - Special issue on software reliability
Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Unreliable failure detectors for reliable distributed systems
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Self-stabilization
Stability of a one-dimensional discrete-time asynchronous swarm
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics
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The safe flocking problem requires a collection of N mobile agents to (a) converge to and maintain an equi-spaced lattice formation, (b) arrive at a destination, and (c) always maintain a minimum safe separation. Safe flocking in Euclidean spaces is a well-studied and difficult coordination problem. Motivated by real-world deployment of multi-agent systems, this paper studies onedimensional safe flocking, where agents are afflicted by actuator faults. An actuator fault is a new type of failure that causes an affected agent to be stuck moving with an arbitrary velocity. In this setting, first, a self-stabilizing solution for the problem is presented. This relies on a failure detector for actuator faults. Next, it is shown that certain actuator faults cannot be detected, while others may require O(N) time for detection. Finally, a simple failure detector that achieves the latter bound is presented. Several simulation results are presented for illustrating the effects of failures on the progress towards flocking.