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A finite automaton, simply referred to as a robot , has to explore a graph, that is, visit all the nodes of the graph. The robot has no a priori knowledge of the topology of the graph, nor of its size. It is known that for any k -state robot, there exists a graph of maximum degree 3 that the robot cannot explore. This article considers the effects of allowing the system designer to add short labels to the graph nodes in a preprocessing stage, for helping the exploration by the robot. We describe an exploration algorithm that, given appropriate 2-bit labels (in fact, only 3-valued labels), allows a robot to explore all graphs. Furthermore, we describe a suitable labeling algorithm for generating the required labels in linear time. We also show how to modify our labeling scheme so that a robot can explore all graphs of bounded degree, given appropriate 1-bit labels. In other words, although there is no robot able to explore all graphs of maximum degree 3, there is a robot R, and a way to color in black or white the nodes of any bounded-degree graph G , so that R can explore the colored graph G . Finally, we give impossibility results regarding graph exploration by a robot with no internal memory (i.e., a single-state automaton).

We consider the task of exploring graphs with anonymous nodes by a team of non-cooperative robots, modeled as finite automata. For exploration to be completed, each edge of the graph has to be traversed by at least one robot. In this paper, the robots have no a priori knowledge of the topology of the graph, nor of its size, and we are interested in the amount of memory the robots need to accomplish exploration, We introduce the so-called {\em reduced automata technique}, and we show how to use this technique for deriving several space lower bounds for exploration. Informally speaking, the reduced automata technique consists in reducing a robot to a simpler form that preserves its “core” behavior on some graphs. Using this technique, we first show that any set of $q\geq 1$ non-cooperative robots, requires $\Omega(\log(\frac{n}{q}))$ memory bits to explore all $n$-node graphs. The proof implies that, for any set of $q K$-state robots, there exists a graph of size $O(qK)$ that no robot of this set can explore, which improves the $O(K^{O(q)})$ bound by Rollik (1980). Our main result is an application of this latter result, concerning {\em terminating} graph exploration with one robot, i.e., in which the robot is requested to stop after completing exploration. For this task, the robot is provided with a pebble, that it can use to mark nodes (without such a marker, even terminating exploration of cycles cannot be achieved). We prove that terminating exploration requires $\Omega(\log n)$ bits of memory for a robot achieving this task in all $n$-node graphs.