Who is the leader? Dynamic role allocation through communication in a population of homogeneous robots

The field of collective robotics has been raising increasing interest in the last few years. In the vast majority of works devoted to collective robotics robots play all the same function, while less attention has been paid to groups of robots with different roles (teams). In this paper we evolve a population of homogeneous robots for dynamically allocating roles through bodily and communicative interactions. Evolved solutions are not only able to efficiently decide who is the leader, but are also robust to changes in team's size, demonstrating the ability of Evolutionary Robotics to find efficient and robust solution to difficult design challenges by relying on self­organizing principles. Our evolved system might be used for improving robots' performance in all the cases in which robots have to accomplish collective tasks for which the presence of a leader might be useful.