06 October 2025
Robot swarms are large groups of robots that can self-organize and coordinate to perform tasks that are beyond their individual capabilities. The collective behaviour of a robot swarm results from the interactions that the robots have with the environment and with their peers. Direct communication and stigmergy are two communication mechanisms that can mediate these interactions and enable cooperative collective behaviours. In direct communication, robots transmit information to peers within communication range during encounters. Conversely, stigmergy is a form of indirect communication in which robots modify the environment to leave information traces that can be perceived asynchronously.
Previous work has shown that automatic modular design (AutoMoDe) can automatically design coordination strategies for robot swarms using either mechanism. However, the two have so far been treated separately. In this paper, EMERGE partners from the University of Bristol show that AutoMoDe can also select between direct communication and stigmergy within a single design process. The authors conduct simulation experiments with a swarm of e-puck robots that must perform homing, task allocation, and aggregation missions. The results show that the automatically designed robot swarms operate with communication strategies that leverage either mechanism in a mission-specific way. They observed that when appropriate environmental cues are missing to perform a mission, or when the swarm cannot effectively use them, the design process automatically compensates by relying on communication.
Read the paper in the link below.
More Information
