Toward Soft Heterogeneity in Robotic Swarms

Abstract

Diversity and inequality are essences of our real world. Ant colonies are comprised of hundreds of individuals, with no two of them being exactly identical. A flock of birds contains individuals with slight variations in size, speed and vision. Looking at human societies such diversity can be seen among individuals differing in body shape and in physical and cognitive abilities. The concept of softly heterogeneous robotic swarms uses the notion of heterogeneity in nature, and introduces a swarm of robots which all have the same goals, but have minor differences in their capabilities. This term is in contrast to the hard heterogeneity of swarms in which robots are of strictly different types and have strictly different goals and capabilities.