Multi-Robot Fast-Paced Coordination with Leader Election

Abstract

Coordination in Multi-Robot Systems is an active research line in Artificial Intelligence applied to Robotics. Through coordination, a team of robots can efficiently achieve their pre-defined global objective. From a wide range of multi-agent coordination sub-topics, one of the current open issues is task assignment and role selection in fast-paced environments. In homogeneous teams, where robots have the ability to dynamically change roles, working in highly dynamic and stochastic environments, it is important that any solution is able to perform and achieve results while complying with realtime constraints. In this paper, we balance the advantages and disadvantages of completely decentralised solutions and centralised ones, and then present our solution for leader election among a team, which is based on the Raft algorithm and tackles two of its limitations. The proposed solution was implemented in a real team of soccer-playing robots and the experimental results are thoroughly presented and discussed.