Information flow principles for plasticity in foraging robot swarms

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• 作者：Lenka Pitonakova ; Richard Crowder ; Seth Bullock
• 关键词：Swarm robotics ; Foraging ; Communication ; Self ; organisation ; Plasticity
• 刊名：Swarm Intelligence
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：March 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：10
• 期：1
• 页码：33-63
• 全文大小：5,016 KB
• 刊物类别：Engineering
• 刊物主题：Communications Engineering and Networks
  Computer Communication Networks
  Probability and Statistics in Computer Science
  Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks
  Coding and Information Theory
  Electronic and Computer Engineering
  
• 出版者：Springer New York
• ISSN：1935-3820

文摘

An important characteristic of a robot swarm that must operate in the real world is the ability to cope with changeable environments by exhibiting behavioural plasticity at the collective level. For example, a swarm of foraging robots should be able to repeatedly reorganise in order to exploit resource deposits that appear intermittently in different locations throughout their environment. In this paper, we report on simulation experiments with homogeneous foraging robot teams and show that analysing swarm behaviour in terms of information flow can help us to identify whether a particular behavioural strategy is likely to exhibit useful swarm plasticity in response to dynamic environments. While it is beneficial to maximise the rate at which robots share information when they make collective decisions in a static environment, plastic swarm behaviour in changeable environments requires regulated information transfer in order to achieve a balance between the exploitation of existing information and exploration leading to acquisition of new information. We give examples of how information flow analysis can help designers to decide on robot control strategies with relevance to a number of applications explored in the swarm robotics literature.