David Garzón Ramos, Juan B. Medina, Sabine Hauert, Mauro Birattari (2025). "Direct Communication or Stigmergy? Selecting Communication Mechanisms for Robot Swarms via Automatic Modular Design." Proceedings of the ALIFE 2025: Ciphers of Life: Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2025. Kyoto, Japan. (pp. 87). DOI: 10.1162/ISAL.a.915
Abstract: Direct communication and stigmergy are two communication mechanisms that enable coordination and cooperation in robot swarms. 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, we show that AutoMoDe can also select between direct communication and stigmergy within a single design process. We 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. We 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.
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