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Potential of Heterogeneity in Collective Behaviors: A Case Study on Heterogeneous Swarms

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PRIMA 2015: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9387))

Abstract

Research in swarm robotics and collective behaviors is often focused on homogeneous swarms. However, heterogeneity in behaviors can be advantageous as we know, for example, from studies on social insects. Our objective is to study the hypothesis that there are potential advantages of heterogeneous swarms over homogeneous swarms in an aggregation scenario inspired by behaviors of juvenile honeybees. Even without task switching – that is, with predefined, static roles for certain swarm fractions – we find in our case study that heterogeneous swarms can outperform homogeneous swarms for a predetermined set of basic behaviors. We use methods of evolutionary computation to define behaviors imitating those found in honeybees (random walkers, wall followers, goal finders, immobile agents) and also to find well-adapted swarm fractions of different predetermined behaviors. Our results show that non-trivial distributions of behaviors give better aggregation performance.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Artificial Life Laboratory at the Department of Zoology, Karl-Franzens University Graz, Graz, Austria

    Daniela Kengyel, Payam Zahadat, Gerald Radspieler & Thomas Schmickl

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Heiko Hamann

  3. Institute for Software Technology, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Franz Wotawa

Authors
  1. Daniela Kengyel
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  2. Heiko Hamann
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  3. Payam Zahadat
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  4. Gerald Radspieler
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  5. Franz Wotawa
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  6. Thomas Schmickl
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniela Kengyel .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Jinan University, Guangzhou, China

    Qingliang Chen

  2. Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Paolo Torroni

  3. Inria - Sophia Antipolis-Méditerran, Sophia Antipolis, France

    Serena Villata

  4. National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jane Hsu

  5. Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Andrea Omicini

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Kengyel, D., Hamann, H., Zahadat, P., Radspieler, G., Wotawa, F., Schmickl, T. (2015). Potential of Heterogeneity in Collective Behaviors: A Case Study on Heterogeneous Swarms. In: Chen, Q., Torroni, P., Villata, S., Hsu, J., Omicini, A. (eds) PRIMA 2015: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems. PRIMA 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9387. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25524-8_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25524-8_13

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