Robot swarm democracy: the importance of informed individuals against zealots

Masi, Giulia De; Prasetyo, Judhi; Zakir, Raina; Mankovskii, Nikita; Ferrante, Eliseo; Tuci, Elio

doi:10.1007/s11721-021-00197-3

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…This approach uses Majority rule to select neighbour opinions while updating the robot's opinion based on Cross-Inhibition. Other variations involve slightly different details of the Voter model or Majority rule, as seen in [26], [27], [28], [29].…”

Section: Hand-coded Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Review of Collective Decision Making in Swarm Robotics

Ibrahim,

Alkilabi,

Hasoon Khayeat

et al. 2024

J. Al-Qadisiyah Comp. Sci. Math.

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Swarm robotics is a distinctive type of multi-robotic system that relies on local communication among the swarm members to generate a desired global behaviour. This implies a lack of global information, requiring robots to sense and communicate using sensors and actuators located on their bodies. Consequently, the robots within the swarm must leverage collective intelligence to solve the problem at hand, as no individual robot can accomplish the task independently. This article provides an overview of swarm robotics in general, highlighting its characteristics that distinguish it from other multi-robotic systems and simultaneously serve as motivation to adopt a swarm robotics approach. A closer examination of collective decision making within swarm robotics and its design problem also provided, classifying design methods into manual design and automatic approaches. The most commonly used automatic approaches to design collective decision making in swarm robotics are explained, along with a mention of the benefits and drawbacks of such approaches. However, this review does not cover aspects such as the swarm collective behaviours – except collective decision making – and the swarm robotics tasks.

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Section: Hand-coded Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Review of Collective Decision Making in Swarm Robotics

Ibrahim,

Alkilabi,

Hasoon Khayeat

et al. 2024

J. Al-Qadisiyah Comp. Sci. Math.

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“…The technique of using informed individuals to steer the collective dynamics has already been used in artificial systems with various types of collective behaviours. For example, informed individuals have been used in flocking [5,8,9] to guide the robot swarm in the desired direction, in collective decision making [23,20] to achieve adaptability, and in self-organised aggregation to differentiate between multiple sites [11,12,10,16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Controlling Robot Swarm Aggregation through a Minority of Informed Robots

Sion¹,

Reina²,

Birattari³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Self-organised aggregation is a well studied behaviour in swarm robotics as it is the pre-condition for the development of more advanced group-level responses. In this paper, we investigate the design of decentralised algorithms for a swarm of heterogeneous robots that self-aggregate over distinct target sites. A previous study has shown that including as part of the swarm a number of informed robots can steer the dynamic of the aggregation process to a desirable distribution of the swarm between the available aggregation sites. We have replicated the results of the previous study using a simplified approach, we removed constraints related to the communication protocol of the robots and simplified the control mechanisms regulating the transitions between states of the probabilistic controller. The results show that the performances obtained with the previous, more complex, controller can be replicated with our simplified approach which offers clear advantages in terms of portability to the physical robots and in terms of flexibility. That is, our simplified approach can generate self-organised aggregation responses in a larger set of operating conditions than what can be achieved with the complex controller.

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“…This method used to steer the group dynamic of the aggregation process is inspired by collective behaviours observed in biology where a minority of individuals aware of pertinent environmental information dictate the group behaviour [5,3]. The concept of informed robots has already been applied to a number of diverse collective behaviours in swarm robotics such as flocking [4,8,9], collective decision making [22,6] or, as in our study, self-organised aggregation [11,12,10,15]. Firat et al [10,11] originally introduced informed robots in an aggregation task on two sites in order for the entire swarm to aggregate on only one of them.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of the Update Time on the Aggregation of Robotic Swarms Through Informed Robots

Sion

Reina²,

Birattari³

et al. 2022

From Animals to Animats 16

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Self-organised aggregation is one of the basic collective behaviours studied in swarm robotics. In this paper, we investigate an aggregation problem occurring on two different sites. Previous studies have shown that a minority of robots, informed about the site on which they have to aggregate, can control the final distribution of the entire robot swarm on the sites. We reproduce this strategy by adapting the previous probabilistic finite-state machine to a new simulated robotic platform: the Kilobot. Our simulation results highlight that the update time (i.e., the amount of time a robot waits before making a decision on leaving a site) impacts the dynamics of the aggregation process. Namely, a longer update time lowers the number of robots wandering in the arena, but can slow down the dynamics when the target final distribution is far from the one initially formed. To ensure a low number of wandering robots while maintaining a quick convergence towards the target final distribution of the swarm, we introduce the concept of a dynamic update time increasing during the aggregation process.

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Robot swarm democracy: the importance of informed individuals against zealots

Cited by 12 publications

References 47 publications

Review of Collective Decision Making in Swarm Robotics

Review of Collective Decision Making in Swarm Robotics

Controlling Robot Swarm Aggregation through a Minority of Informed Robots

Impact of the Update Time on the Aggregation of Robotic Swarms Through Informed Robots

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