Bio-Inspired Communication for Self-Regulated Multi-Robot Sytems

Abstract

{ - a network of tasks and robots, each robot has a preference for task, each task has urgency - robots communicate between themselves task urgencies and how many are on a task - summary of experiments with ants and bees switching to a better food source (only bees could) -> to react quickly on changes, broadcast information is needed - overview of robot communication types (local sharing the best compared to global sharing or stigmergy) - in real robot experiment, they have a server that gathers data from robots and distributes to robots (i.e. no comm between robots) - robots can effectively distribute themselves between tasks - decreased performance when colony size doubled - when only local communication, larger colonies perform better and small colonies perform similarly }