Collective Decision Making in Communication-Constrained Environments
Abstract
One of the main tasks for autonomous robot swarms is to collectively decide on the best available option. Achieving that requires a high quality communication between the agents that may not be always available in a real world environment. In this paper we introduce the communication-constrained collective decision-making problem where some areas of the environment limit the agents' ability to communicate, either by reducing success rate or blocking the communication channels. We propose a decentralised algorithm for mapping environmental features for robot swarms as well as improving collective decision making in communication-limited environments without prior knowledge of the communication landscape. Our results show that making a collective aware of the communication environment can improve the speed of convergence in the presence of communication limitations, at least 3 times faster, without sacrificing accuracy.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2207.09564,
title = {Collective Decision Making in Communication-Constrained Environments},
author = {Thomas G. Kelly and Mohammad Divband Soorati and Klaus-Peter Zauner and Sarvapali D. Ramchurn and Danesh Tarapore},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.09564},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
6 pages, 7 figures, accepted to the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022)