Autonomous identification of local agents in multi-agent robotic swarms

With the emergence of swarm intelligence and evolutionary algorithms, system designers are creating robotic swarms of continuously increasing sizes. As the size of a swarm increases, it is imperative to have a uniform program collectively downloaded on all the agents in it. These uniform programs impede the designer's ability to designate distinct identities for various agents in the swarm. In this work we propose an algorithm that, when implemented in a robotic swarm, allows the locally interacting agents to autonomously designate unique identifications to each other at run time. The results show that when used on a small swarm of autonomous robots, running the algorithm led to a steady state where every agent in a local neighborhood was assigned a unique identification value.