Master Election for Time Synchronization in Swarm Robotic Systems

Abstract

Swarm robotics is a new area of research which has gained a lot of interest according to the advantages it offers over current distributed systems. It is becoming in many wireless distributed applications, the potential alternative for the existing systems. Time synchronization as a key concept in distributed systems, will be a main requirement in swarm robotics, as soon as the latter is going to substitute any of the current distributed systems. Most of time synchronization protocols are master-based ones, where a master node is selected and is assumed to hold the time reference, which is used to synchronize other nodes. Importing such time synchronization protocols to the high dynamic swarm systems will introduce serious challenges based on their intensive degree of motion. The Master election process will be required continuously because of the permanent connections and disconnections of the swarms, which implies intensive communication overhead. Reducing the communication overhead, saving the robots energy and achieving a single time scale at each swarm connection/disconnection is the main goal of this work.