Task Router Skill

What This Skill Does

The Task Router skill serves as the central nervous system for OpenClaw multi-agent architectures. It acts as an intelligent, distributed task queue that decouples agent communication from task execution. By monitoring capabilities, it matches tasks to the most suitable available agent, manages lifecycle states from pending to completion, and handles complex workflows through asynchronous handoffs. Its internal load balancer ensures that tasks are distributed efficiently using strategies like least-loaded or round-robin, preventing bottlenecks while ensuring that critical work is prioritized. The skill also features built-in fault tolerance, including automated dead-letter queues for failed operations and retry logic to recover from transient agent timeouts.

Installation

To integrate Task Router into your OpenClaw ecosystem, execute the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/capt-marbles/task-router-skill

Once installed, verify the installation by checking your configuration directory at ~/.openclaw/task-router/. Ensure your agents.yaml is populated with the relevant capabilities of your current agent fleet so the router can begin matching tasks immediately.

Use Cases

• Autonomous Research Pipelines: A main agent initiates a research task during a heartbeat, which is then routed to a dedicated 'researcher' agent, allowing the main agent to continue handling user interactions without being blocked.
• Multi-Agent Chain-of-Thought: Coordinating complex workflows where the output of a data-analysis agent serves as the required input for a report-generation agent.
• Robust Load Balancing: Managing a fleet of identical agents to handle high-volume image generation requests, ensuring no single agent is overwhelmed while others remain idle.
• Failure Recovery: Automatically identifying unresponsive agents and reassigning their pending tasks to healthy standby agents, ensuring system uptime.

Example Prompts

1. "Task Router: Assign the latest high-priority market research task to the research-agent with the lowest current load."
2. "Queue a new task for image generation using the 'style-transfer' capability and notify me in the main session when it is complete."
3. "Check the status of all pending tasks and report which agent is currently assigned to the 'Competitor Analysis' project."

Tips & Limitations

• Tip: Adjust your check_interval in config.yaml to balance between responsiveness and system resource usage; a 30-second interval is standard for most operations.
• Tip: Always assign descriptive capabilities to your agents to prevent task rejection due to mismatching requirements.
• Limitation: The Task Router currently requires direct filesystem access to manage its queue directories; ensure your agent environment has sufficient read/write permissions at the ~/.openclaw/ path.
• Limitation: Asynchronous handoffs are best used for non-blocking work; avoid chaining thousands of sequential tasks without monitoring the failed/ queue, as logs can grow rapidly during high-failure scenarios.