Title: Distributed strategy for robots recruitment in swarm-based systems

Authors: Luneque Del Rio de Souza e Silva Junior; Nadia Nedjah

Addresses: System Engineering and Computer Science Program, COPPE, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Cidade Universitária, Centro de Tecnologia, Bloco H, Brazil ' Department of Electronics Engineering and Telecommunication, Faculty of Engineering, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rua São Francisco Xavier, 524, Maracanã, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Abstract: In a scenario wherein several tasks must be done cooperatively by a robotic swarm, it is sometimes mandatory to prescribe the robots that should execute each one of those tasks. A problem related to the division of labour among the swarm members is the robot recruitment. When a specific robot needs assistance, it must create a group, selecting other robots to help in the execution of the given task. The main contribution of this work is the development of a distributed recruitment strategy based mainly on the propagation of messages among neighbouring robots. The algorithm is evaluated through simulations, wherein some recruitment features are analysed by subjecting the swarm to different conditions, such as the total number of robots in the swarm and the number of robots that start the recruitment. This strategy is promising, since robots have no global knowledge about the swarm, relying only in the neighbourhood information.

Keywords: swarm robotics; robot recruitment; asynchronous communication; distributed algorithms; wave algorithm; robot swarms; division of labour; neighbouring robots; simulation; robot tasks; task execution.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIC.2016.076336

International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, 2016 Vol.8 No.2, pp.99 - 108

Received: 14 Mar 2015
Accepted: 21 Aug 2015
Published online: 04 May 2016 *

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