Raina Zakir (Université Libre De Bruxelles), “Robust Decision-Making in Minimalistic Robot Swarms Under Social Noise”

Abstract

Minimalistic robot swarms hold great promise for applications in healthcare, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. A key challenge lies in enabling these robots to rapidly and reliably reach consensus using limited communication, computation, and memory. In this talk, we explore how robot swarms can collectively identify the best among multiple discrete options in their environment. We analyze and compare several prominent decision-making algorithms through both simulations and theoretical modeling. Particular attention is given to how asocial behaviors—introducing social noise—affect convergence and robustness. Our results offer insights into designing simple yet effective voting rules for robust consensus in decentralized swarm systems.

Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.