Swarm Engineering Through Quantitative Measurement of Swarm Robotic Principles in a 10,000 Robot Swarm

John Harwell, Maria Gini

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Main track. Pages 336-342.

Abstract

When designing swarm-robotic systems, system-

atic comparison of algorithms from different do-

mains is necessary to determine which is capa-

ble of scaling up to handle the target problem size

and target operating conditions. We propose a set

of quantitative metrics for scalability, flexibility,

and emergence which are capable of addressing

these needs during the system design process. We

demonstrate the applicability of our proposed met-

rics as a design tool by solving a large object gath-

ering problem in temporally varying operating con-

ditions using iterative hypothesis evaluation. We

provide experimental results obtained in simulation

for swarms of over 10,000 robots.