Related papers: Exploring Behavior Discovery Methods for Heterogen…
Collective behaviours often need to be expressed through numerical features, e.g., for classification or imitation learning. This problem is often addressed by proposing an ad-hoc feature set for a particular swarm behaviour context,…
In collective robotic systems, the automatic generation of controllers for complex tasks is still a challenging problem. Open-ended evolution of complex robot behaviors can be a possible solution whereby an intrinsic driver for pattern…
Individual differences in learning behavior within social groups, whether in humans, other animals, or among robots, can have significant effects on collective task performance. This is because it can affect individuals' response to the…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…
Swarm foraging is a common test case application for multi-robot systems. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for controlling swarm robots with limited communication range and storage capacity to efficiently search for and retrieve…
The emerging collective motions of swarms of interacting agents are a subject of great interest in application areas ranging from biology to physics and robotics. In this paper, we conduct a careful analysis of the collective dynamics of a…
Effective exploration abilities are fundamental for robot swarms, especially when small, inexpensive robots are employed (e.g., micro- or nano-robots). Random walks are often the only viable choice if robots are too constrained regarding…
Despite significant research, robotic swarms have yet to be useful in solving real-world problems, largely due to the difficulty of creating and controlling swarming behaviors in multi-agent systems. Traditional top-down approaches in which…
Emergence and emergent behaviors are often defined as cases where changes in local interactions between agents at a lower level effectively changes what occurs in the higher level of the system (i.e., the whole swarm) and its properties.…
The collective performance or capacity of collaborative autonomous systems such as a swarm of robots is jointly influenced by the morphology and the behavior of individual systems in that collective. In that context, this paper explores how…
This research proposes new tools for investigation of behavioral diversity in multi-robot systems and a significant body of results using these tools in simulated and real mobile robot experiments. The experiments specifically describe a…
Swarm robotic search is concerned with searching targets in unknown environments (e.g., for search and rescue or hazard localization), using a large number of collaborating simple mobile robots. In such applications, decentralized swarm…
Inter-individual differences are studied in natural systems, such as fish, bees, and humans, as they contribute to the complexity of both individual and collective behaviors. However, individuality in artificial systems, such as robotic…
A contextual anomaly detection method is proposed and applied to the physical motions of a robot swarm executing a coverage task. Using simulations of a swarm's normal behavior, a normalizing flow is trained to predict the likelihood of a…
The deployment of simple emergent behaviors in swarm robotics has been well-rehearsed in the literature. A recent study has shown how self-aggregation is possible in a multitask approach -- where multiple self-aggregation task instances…
We study the limits of linear modeling of swarm behavior by characterizing the inflection point beyond which linear models of swarm collective behavior break down. The problem we consider is a central place object gathering task. We design…
Decentralized swarm robotic solutions to searching for targets that emit a spatially varying signal promise task parallelism, time efficiency, and fault tolerance. It is, however, challenging for swarm algorithms to offer scalability and…
Trust between humans and multi-agent robotic swarms may be analyzed using human preferences. These preferences are expressed by an individual as a sequence of ordered comparisons between pairs of swarm behaviors. An individual's preference…
Human-AI collaboration requires AI agents to understand human behavior for effective coordination. While advances in foundation models show promising capabilities in understanding and showing human-like behavior, their application in…
Rapid performance recovery from unforeseen environmental perturbations remains a grand challenge in swarm robotics. To solve this challenge, we investigate a behaviour adaptation approach, where one searches an archive of controllers for…