Collective decision-making by a group of cockroach-like robots

Abstract

In group-living animals, aggregation favours interactions as well as information exchanges between individuals, and allows thus the emergence of complex collective behaviors. In previous works, a model of a self-enhanced aggregation was deduced from experiments with the cockroach Blattella germanica. In this work, this model was implemented in micro-robots Alice and successfully reproduced the aggregation dynamics observed in a group of cockroaches. We showed that this aggregation process, based on a small set of simple behavioral rules and interactions among individuals, can be used by the group of robots to select collectively an aggregation site among two identical or different shelters. Moreover, we showed that the aggregation mechanism allows the robots as a group to "estimate" the size of each shelter during the collective decision-making process, a capacity which is not explicitly coded at the individual level but that simply emerges from the aggregation behaviour.