Socially Inspired Communication in Swarm Robotics

Abstract: Localized communication in swarms has been shown to increase swarm effectiveness in some situations by allowing for additional opportunities for cooperation. However, communication and utilization of potentially outdated information is also a concern. We present an explicit non-directional goal-based communication model and message accept/reject scheme, and test our model in a set of object gathering experiments with a swarm of robots. The results of the experiments indicate that even low levels of communication regarding the swarm's goal outperform high levels of random information communication.