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Analysis of long-term swarm performance based on short-term experiments

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Abstract

Swarm robotics is a branch of collective robotics systems that offers a set of remarkable advantages over other systems. The global behavior of swarm systems emerges from the local rules implemented at the individual level. Therefore, characterizing a global performance obtained at the swarm level is one of the main challenges, especially under complex dynamics such as spatial interferences. In this paper, we exploit the central limit theorem to analyze and characterize the swarm performance over long-term deadlines. The developed model is verified on two tasks: a foraging task and an object filtering task.

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Notes

  1. The central limit theorem, in its classic version, states that the mean of a sufficiently large set of independent and identically distributed random variables each with a finite mean and variance tends to be distributed normally (Rice 2001).

  2. ARGoS is a discrete-time physics-based simulation framework developed within the Swarmanoid project. It can simulate various robots at different levels of details, as well as a large set of sensors and actuators.

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Correspondence to Yara Khaluf.

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Communicated by C. M. Vide.

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Khaluf, Y., Birattari, M. & Rammig, F. Analysis of long-term swarm performance based on short-term experiments. Soft Comput 20, 37–48 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-015-1958-0

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