NICOP - Swarm Awareness
Abstract
Swarms systems are composed of a large number of autonomous agents, such asrobots or sensors, which interact with each other and with the environment toperform a common task. A typical feature of swarm systems regards the limitedknowledge of the agents, which have sensing capabilities limited to a local rangearound them. Therefore, each agent has access to limited information and haspartial knowledge of the status of the global swarm. This is a challenge for thedeployment of swarms for collective tasks, such as decision-making; whiledecentralised collective decision-making mechanisms are being developed, thequestion of how individual agents recognise in a decentralised way that a groupdecision has been reached, and what it is, are usually deferred. The present projectaims to endow the swarm with awareness of its own state, thus allowing individualagents to reach a consensus on the global swarm state. Particular examples ofstates to measure are swarm size (number of agents), fraction of the swarmcommitted to a unique decision (quorum), and super-threshold decision (decisionstate).The challenge is to allow the swarm to reach a consensus on its own global state.Each agent can noisily estimate this state, however, different agents may disagree.To reach an agreement on the global swarm, individuals use consensus decisionalgorithms. We refer to decentralised sensing of swarm state as swarm awareness.In case of quorum sensing, this can be seen as a meta-decision, where the swarmmust decide if the decision has been taken or not. Similar problems have beeninvestigated in social insect behaviour, and solutions deployed for engineeredsystems
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 19, 2018
- Source ID
- N629091812166
Entities
People
- James Marshall
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Sheffield