Brief Announcement: Efficient Collaborative Tree Exploration with Breadth-First Depth-Next

We consider the problem of collaborative tree exploration posed by Fraigniaud, Gasieniec, Kowalski, and Pelc [8] where a team of k agents is tasked to collectively go through all the edges of an unknown tree as fast as possible and return to the root. Denoting by n the total number of nodes and by D the tree depth, the O(n/log(k) + D) algorithm of [8] achieves the best competitive ratio known with respect to the optimal exploration algorithm that knows the tree in advance, which takes order max {2n/k, 2D} rounds. Brass, Cabrera-Mora, Gasparri, and Xiao [1] consider an alternative performance criterion, the additive overhead with respect to 2n/k, and obtain a 2n/k + O((D + k)^k) runtime guarantee. In this announcement, we present 'Breadth-First Depth-Next' (BFDN), a novel and simple algorithm that performs collaborative tree exploration in time 2n/k + O(D² log(k)), thus outperforming [1] for all values of (n, D) and being order-optimal for fixed k and trees with depth D = o(√n). The proof of our result crucially relies on the analysis of a simple two-player game with balls in urns that could be of independent interest. We extend the guarantees of BFDN to: scenarios with limited memory and communication, adversarial setups where robots can be blocked, and exploration of classes of non-tree graphs. Finally, we provide a recursive version of BFDN with a runtime of O_ℓ(n/k^1/ℓ + log(k)D^1+1/ℓ) for parameter ℓ ≥ 1, thereby improving performance for trees with large depth. A complete version of the paper is available online [2].