Collective Decision Making: A Biologically Inspired Approach to Making Up All of Your Minds

Abstract

Practical collective robotic systems will be faced with decisions that have to be made in order for them to function effectively. In this paper, we present a biologically inspired algorithm that allows system level decisions to be made. Such decisions ensure consensus amongst the robots that make up a collective system. Our algorithm is based on the collective house hunting strategy of a particular species of ant. A series of experiments were conducted in simulation in order to study our algorithm’s performance. A particular variable, the quorum, was found to strongly impact decision making ability. It was found that setting the quorum as high as the robots that composed a system could reliably measure produced the best results.