Efficient Swarm Consensus: Comparative Evaluation of RLR vs Raft, RaBFT and VSSB-Raft

Abstract Consensus algorithms have been integrated with swarm robotics for decades to maintain a consistent global state among swarm agents in the distributed environment. Common consensus approaches in swarm robotics includes majority voting, average consensus, leader election, and more recently, blockchain-inspired protocols like PoW, PoS, PBFT, and Raft algorithms. However, deploying consensus in swarm robotics has several challenges like computing resource and energy storage constraints, scalability limitations due to message complexity and high latency, and inadequate security to handle byzantine robots in the swarm. Consequently, our research is aimed to design and develop a suitable consensus mechanism that overcomes these limitations and enables effective coordination among swarm robots. This paper primarily focuses on significance of our solution, details on simulator-based experiment and the experiment results discussion.