Abstract

Bio-inspired swarming behaviors provide an effective decentralized way of coordinating robot teams. However, as robot swarms increase in size, bandwidth and time constraints limit the number of agents a human can communicate with and control. To facilitate scalable human interaction with large robot swarms it is desirable to monitor and influence the collective behavior of the entire swarm through limited interactions with a small subset of agents. However, it is also desirable to avoid situations where a small number of agent failures can adversely affect the collective behavior of the swarm. We present a bio-inspired model of swarming that exhibits distinct collective behaviors and affords limited human interaction to estimate and influence these collective behaviors. Using a simple naive Bayes classifier, we show that the global behavior of a swarm can be detected with high accuracy by sampling local information from a small number of agents. We also show that adding a bio-inspired form of quorum sensing to a swarm increases the scalability of human-swarm interactions and also provides an adjustable threshold on the swarm's vulnerability to agent failures.

Degree

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Computer Science

Rights

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