News
2015–16

Another way to get into the spirit of Christmas. Enjoy!

James gave a plenary lecture at the second course on Multiscale Integration in Biological Systems at the Institut Curie in November, in which he demonstrated an early prototype of the DiODe project’s new software tool for modelling collective behaviour.

A swarm of 150 Kilobot robots takes a value-sensitive decentralised decision between two options (red and blue). The swarm must select the best quality option if the quality is higher than a given threshold (in this study, greater than 1.5). In this experiment, the options have quality v=5 thus the swarm makes a decision for the option blue.

The overlaying coloured circles show the two options localised in the environment. The options are signalled through two static Kilobot robots acting as beacons that send infrared messages with the option’s ID and quality.

The robots light up their LED in a colour that corresponds to their internal commitment state: green for the uncommitted state and red and blue for commitment to the option of the respective colour.

Supplementary video of the paper:

Reina, A, Bose, T, Trianni, V and Marshall, J A R (2016) ‘Effects of spatiality on value-sensitive decisions made by robot swarms’, DARS 2016.

Late breaking paper accepted at SAB 2016: ‘Swarm deadlock for symmetric choices over three or more options’ by Andreagiovanni Reina, James A R Marshall and Thomas Bose.

A bifurcation analysis of the model shows that for previous parameterisations there is always decision deadlock in the case of three or more same-quality options.

This result motivates the change of parameterisation with respect to previous work.

Fresh paper submitted to DARS 2016: ‘Effects of spatiality on value-sensitive decisions made by robot swarms’ by Andreagiovanni Reina, Thomas Bose, Vito Trianni and James A R Marshall.

In the video below, a swarm of 150 Kilobot robots takes a value-sensitive decentralised decision between two options (red and blue). The swarm must select the best quality option if the quality is higher than a given threshold (in this study, greater than 1.5). In this experiment, the options have quality v=5 thus the swarm makes a decision for one option (in this case, the blue option).

The overlaying coloured circles show the two options localised in the environment. The options are signalled through two static Kilobot robots acting as beacons that send infrared messages with the option’s ID and quality.

The robots light up their LED in a colour that corresponds to their internal commitment state: green for the uncommitted state and red and blue for commitment to the option of the respective colour.

The progress of the DiODe project can now be followed on YouTube. Below you see a video which shows the initial state of setting up a tracking system for the Kilobots, the micro-robots we use to investigate consensus decision-making experimentally.