Distributed Algorithms for Recruitment and Coordinated Motion in Swarm Robotic Systems

In the last decades, studies on swarm robotics have grown significantly, with different implementation details becoming of interest in research works. Although the first idea in swarm robotics should be the application or the task that robots should perform, other aspects can be studied. In a robotic swarm, it may be necessary to select the robots that will perform a given task, which is 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 starts recruiting other robots of the swarm. In this chapter, a distributed algorithm, termed the wave algorithm, is exploited to perform the recruitment based on robot message passing to neighboring robots. The intended task to be done is the coordinated motion of the recruited robots that must follow the robot that starts the recruitment.