Robot swarms provide a potential solution to a wide range of collective decision problems due to their large scale, which enables them to explore large environments, and their local intensive communication, which allows information sharing. Despite this, the majority of decision-making processes are designed to solve a single-step decision process. The goal of this study is to design robot swarms that are able to develop proper collective responses to decisions that emerge in parallel in the robot group. We aim to challenge the collective dynamics in order to examine the extent to which it would be possible to allow two decisions correspondingly related to parallel development. We consider both best-of-n and symmetry-breaking decisions and investigate the performance of two well-known voting mechanisms: the majority rule and the voting model. Our results confirm the possibility to build up a proper response to an emerging decision and highlight the key parameters that influence its success.

Issue Section:
General Conference
swarm robotics, collective decision-making, collective response, best-of-n problem, symmetry-breaking problem
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© 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2021
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Issue Section:
General Conference