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About

Bastian Degener is a computer scientist whose research centers on the theory of autonomous mobile robots, distributed algorithms, and swarm coordination in geometric settings. His work has made significant contributions to understanding how groups of robots with limited capabilities — particularly restricted visibility and no centralized control — can solve fundamental coordination problems such as gathering, formation, and chain construction. Degener is perhaps best known for establishing tight runtime bounds for the gathering problem, wherein *n* robots must converge to a single point without a predefined meeting location. His 2011 paper on synchronous gathering with limited visibility has accumulated 92 citations and remains a landmark theoretical result in the field. Complementing this, his local O(n²) gathering algorithm provided one of the first concrete complexity guarantees for locally-constrained robot systems, earning 33 citations. His 2011 work on collisionless gathering further extended these results to robots with physical extent, addressing practical collision avoidance concerns. Beyond gathering, Degener investigated chain-formation strategies and energy-efficient coordination, exploring how robots can self-organize while minimizing resource consumption. Across roughly a decade of focused research, his papers have collectively gathered over 275 citations, offering foundational theoretical tools that continue to inform distributed robotics and algorithmic analysis of multi-agent systems.