COLLECTIVE PERCEPTION IN A SWARM OF AUTONOMOUS ROBOTS

Giuseppe Morlino, Vito Trianni, Elio Tuci

2010

Abstract

We present a study that aims at understanding how perception can be the result of a collective, self-organising process. A group of robots is placed in an environment characterized by black spots painted on the ground. The density of the spots can vary from trial to trial, and robots have to collectively encode such density into a coherent flashing activity. Overall, robots should prove capable of perceiving the global density by exploiting only local information and robot-robot interactions. We show how we can synthesize individual controllers that allow collective perception by exploiting evolutionary robotics techniques. This work is a first attempt to study cognitive abilities such as perception, decision-making, or attention in a synthetic setup as result of a collective, self-organising process.

References

  1. Beer, R. D. (1995). A dynamical systems perspective on agent-environment interaction. Art. Intell., 72:173- 215.
  2. Dehaene, S. (2003). The neural basis of the weber-fechner law: a logarithmic mental number line. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(4):145-147.
  3. Detrain, C. and Deneubourg, J.-L. (2006). Self-organized structures in a superorganism: do ants “behave” like molecules? Physics of Life Reviews, 3:162-187.
  4. Grill-Spector, K. (2003). The neural basis of object perception. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 13(2):159- 166.
  5. Hauert, S., Zufferey, J.-C., and Floreano, D. (2009). Evolved swarming without positioning information: an application in aerial communication relay. Autonomous Robots, 26(1):21-32.
  6. Hölldobler, B. and Wilson, E. O. (2008). The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY.
  7. Jonas, P. and Buzsaki, G. (2007). Neural inhibition. Scholarpedia, 2(9):3286.
  8. Leopold, D. A. and Logothetis, N. K. (1996). Activity changes in early visual cortex reflect monkeys percept during binocular rivalry. Nature, 379:549-553.
  9. Loffler, G. (2008). Perception of contours and shapes: Low and intermediate stage mechanisms. Vision Research, 48:2106-2127.
  10. Marshall, J. A. R., Bogacz, R., Dornhaus, A., Planqué, R., Kovacs, T., and Franks, N. R. (2009). On optimal decision-making in brains and social insect colonies. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 6(40):1065- 1074.
  11. Nieh, J. C. (2010). Negative feedback signal that is triggered by peril curbs honey bee recruitment. Current Biology, 20:310-315.
  12. Passino, K., Seeley, T., and Visscher, P. (2008). Swarm cognition in honey bees. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 62:401-414.
  13. Ratcliff, R. and Smith, P. L. (2004). A comparison of sequential sampling models for two-choice reaction time. Psychological Review, 111:333-367.
  14. Romo, R. and Salinas, E. (2003). Flutter discrimination: neural codes, perception, memory and decision making. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4:203-218.
  15. Rubin, N. (2003). Binocular rivalry and perceptual multistability. Trends in Neurosciences, 26(6):289-291.
  16. Sperati, V., Trianni, V., and Nolfi, S. (2010). Evolution of self-organised path formation in a swarm of robots. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ANTS 2010). In press.
  17. Trianni, V. and Nolfi, S. (2009). Self-organising sync in a robotic swarm. a dynamical system view. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Special Issue on Swarm Intelligennce, 13(4):722-741.
  18. Trianni, V. and Tuci, E. (2009). Swarm cognition and artificial life. In Advances in Artificial Life. Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2009).
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Morlino G., Trianni V. and Tuci E. (2010). COLLECTIVE PERCEPTION IN A SWARM OF AUTONOMOUS ROBOTS . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation - Volume 1: ICEC, (IJCCI 2010) ISBN 978-989-8425-31-7, pages 51-59. DOI: 10.5220/0003075400510059


in Bibtex Style

@conference{icec10,
author={Giuseppe Morlino and Vito Trianni and Elio Tuci},
title={COLLECTIVE PERCEPTION IN A SWARM OF AUTONOMOUS ROBOTS},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation - Volume 1: ICEC, (IJCCI 2010)},
year={2010},
pages={51-59},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003075400510059},
isbn={978-989-8425-31-7},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation - Volume 1: ICEC, (IJCCI 2010)
TI - COLLECTIVE PERCEPTION IN A SWARM OF AUTONOMOUS ROBOTS
SN - 978-989-8425-31-7
AU - Morlino G.
AU - Trianni V.
AU - Tuci E.
PY - 2010
SP - 51
EP - 59
DO - 10.5220/0003075400510059