ELECTOR: Deterministic leader election algorithm for modular robots.

A modular robot is an ensemble of programmable robotic modules which are linked together to form a bigger robot. Some applications like programmable matter are using a huge number of modules, potentially millions of modules, and there are many cases in which electing a leader is needed to optimize distributed algorithms. In these algorithms, modules act in collaboration with the condition, the status, and the decision of the leader. The main problem of current leader election algorithms is that most of them rely on random number generation which is difficult to implement in a distributed system. This paper proposes a new algorithm for electing a leader that does not take into consideration any probability approach such as random identifiers or coin flipping. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm reduces the probability of having a symmetric system since it uses the connected interfaces’ number to generate identifiers. The results show that the proposed algorithm, with a complexity of $\theta$(n), will end up with a leader with high probability, and works on all kinds of modular robots, 2D or 3D, despite the particle distribution and/or the system’s graph representation.