Wave algorithm for recruitment in swarm robotics

Abstract

In the last decades, studies on swarm robotics have grown significantly, with different new aspects becoming of interest in research. Although the primary interest in swarm robotics should be the application, which is the task that robots should perform, other aspects are also studied. For instance, in a robotic swarm, it may be necessary to select the robots that would perform a given task, aiming at a division of labor among the members. A similar problem is that of robot recruitment, required when a specific robot needs assistance to execute some tasks and thus needs to recruit other robots of the swarm to do so. In this paper, a distributed algorithm, termed the wave algorithm, is exploited to perform the recruitment based mainly on robot message passing to neighboring robots.