Efficient topological distances and comparable metric ranges

Abstract

Field studies indicate that European starlings in a flock coordinate utilizing a nearest neighbors approach. This model of communication is known in the biological swarm literature as the topological model. Each starling coordinates with a fixed number of nearest neighbors, and this number is referred to as the topological distance. The presented research evaluates the topological model in the context of a swarm robotics task, where a simulated artificial swarm is tasked to search for and go to a goal in the environment. Specifically, experiments are conducted on a high-fidelity, multi-robot simulator to analyze the performance of the tasked swarm as the topological distance is varied. Connections are drawn between the topological model based on starlings and the Delta-disk model, which is widely used in the robotics community to model agent interaction zones. Using graph measures, conditions under which the two models generate comparable networks are presented.