Research Article
Robotic oligarchy: How a few members can control their whole society by doing almost nothing
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/eai.22-3-2017.152412, author={Martin Stefanec and Martina Szopek and Ronald Thenius and Gerald Radspieler and Thomas Schmickl}, title={Robotic oligarchy: How a few members can control their whole society by doing almost nothing}, proceedings={10th EAI International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies (formerly BIONETICS)}, publisher={EAI}, proceedings_a={BICT}, year={2017}, month={3}, keywords={collective-decision-making self-organization bio-inspired al- gorithm honey bees robot swarm swarm control}, doi={10.4108/eai.22-3-2017.152412} }- Martin Stefanec
Martina Szopek
Ronald Thenius
Gerald Radspieler
Thomas Schmickl
Year: 2017
Robotic oligarchy: How a few members can control their whole society by doing almost nothing
BICT
EAI
DOI: 10.4108/eai.22-3-2017.152412
Abstract
In swarm systems like honeybees, ants, fish and birds the individual agents show interesting abilities to decide collectively about the swarms behavior based on only locally available information. One example is the BEECLUST algorithm, which is derived from honeybees and was implemented on autonomous robot swarms several times. Here we demonstrate a translation concerning the environmental stimulus: Honeybees aggregate in temperature fields and we used their behaviors to operate robots in a luminescent field to aggregate at the brightest spot. We demonstrate here by a set of experiments that a swarm of 10 e-puck robots is capable to choose a global optimum over a local optimum and we compare those dynamics to real honeybee behaviors. Then we demonstrate that a few ”social seed robots” can make the swarm choosing a different option collectively. This allows the swarm to be controlled from the outside without any change of its internal program. We analyze this emergent phenomenon and discuss its implications for future decentralized non-invasive swarm control applications.
