Communication Model–Task Pairing in Artificial Swarm Design

Unraveling the nature of the communication model that governs which two individuals in a swarm interact with each other is an important line of inquiry in the collective behavior sciences. A number of models have been proposed in the biological swarm literature, with the leading models being the metric, topological, and visual models. The hypothesis evaluated in this letter is whether the choice of a communication model impacts the performance of a tasked artificial swarm. The biological models are used to design coordination algorithms for a simulated swarm, which are evaluated over a range of six swarm robotics tasks. Each task has an associated set of performance metrics that are used to evaluate how the communication models fare against each other. The general findings demonstrate that the communication model significantly affects the swarm's performance for individual tasks, and this result implies that the communication model-task pairing is an important consideration when designing artificial swarms. Further analysis of each tasks' performance metrics reveals instances in which pairwise considerations of model and one of the various experimental factors become relevant. The reported research demonstrates that the artificial swarm's task performance can be increased through the careful selection of a communication model.