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.
