2022/07/19 by Kelly, Thomas G., Soorati, Mohammad Divband, Zauner, Klaus-Peter +2 · 1 citation
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2207.09564
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.