Investigating the democracy behavior of swarm robots in the case of a best-of-n selection

Abstract

In swarm robotics, a challenging task is to let the decentralized acting agents make a joint decision, when the individual robots of the swarm only have partial knowledge of the search space. In this paper, we propose a new nature-inspired method for decision-making in the case of a best-of-n selection, investigating the democracy behavior of honeybees and implementing it in swarm robots. The feasibility of our model is tested using a swarm consisting of real hardware robots, the so-called Kilobots. It is shown that our proposed democratic model proves to be resistant to malicious manipulation in the consensus-finding process. Thus, the democracy behavior of honeybees implemented in swarm robots robustly finds the best-of-n selection.