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.
翻译:自主机器人群的主要任务之一是集体决定最佳的可用选项。 实现这一点需要代理商之间的高质量沟通,而这些代理商不一定总是在现实世界环境中提供。 在本文件中,我们引入了沟通受限制的集体决策问题,即某些环境领域通过降低成功率或阻断沟通渠道来限制代理商的沟通能力。 我们提出一个分散的算法,用于绘制机器人群的环境特征,以及改善通信环境有限环境中的集体决策,而事先不了解通信环境。 我们的结果显示,集体了解通信环境可以提高通信限制情况下的趋同速度,至少3倍,同时不牺牲准确性。