“Can ants inspire robots?” Self-organized decision making in robotic swarms

Abstract

In swarm robotics, large groups of relatively simple robots cooperate so that they can perform tasks that go beyond their individual capabilities [1], [2]. The interactions among the robots are based on simple behavioral rules that exploit only local information. The robots in a swarm have neither global knowledge, nor a central controller. Therefore, decisions in the swarm have to be taken in a distributed manner based on local interactions. Because of these limitations, the design of collective decision-making methods in swarm robotic systems is a challenging problem. Moreover, the collective decision-making method must be efficient, robust with respect to robot failures, and scale well with the size of the swarm.