Distributed task negotiation in self-reconfigurable robots

Abstract

A self-reconfigurable robot can be viewed as a network of many autonomous modules. Driven by their local information, the modules can initiate tasks that may conflict with each other at the global level. How the modules negotiate and select a coherent task among many competing tasks is thus a critical problem for the control of self-reconfigurable robots. This paper presents a distributed algorithm called DISTINCT to solve this challenging problem and show that it can be successfully applied to the CONRO self-reconfigurable robots. A discussion how to apply DISTINCT to other types of distributed systems such as sensor network, swarm robots, or multi-agent systems is also given.