Collective Perception of Environmental Features in a Robot Swarm

Abstract

In order to be effective, collective decision-making strategies need to be not only fast and accurate, but sufficiently general to be ported and reused across different problem domains. In this paper, we propose a novel problem scenario, collective perception, and use it to compare three different strategies: the DMMD, DMVD, and DC strategies. The robots are required to explore their environment, estimate the frequency of certain features, and collectively perceive which feature is the most frequent. We implemented the collective perception scenario in a swarm robotics system composed of 20 e-pucks and performed robot experiments with all considered strategies. Additionally, we also deepened our study by means of physics-based simulations. The results of our performance comparison in the collective perception scenario are in agreement with previous results for a different problem domain and support the generality of the considered strategies.