QUORUM SENSING FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION AND DECISION-MAKING IN MOBILE AUTONOMOUS TEAMS

Donald A. Sofge, William F. Lawless

2011

Abstract

Design of controllers for teams of mobile autonomous systems presents many challenges that have been addressed in biological systems, such as behavior-based control paradigms that are decentralized, distributed, scalable, and robust. Quorum sensing is a distributed, decentralized decision-making process used by bacteria and by social insects to coordinate group behaviors and perform complex tasks. It is used by bacteria to control the colony behavior for a variety of functions, such as biofilm construction or initiating pathogenicity inside a host. It is used by social insects including the ant Temnothorax albipennis to collectively evaluate and select from amongst potentially many new nesting sites.Honeybees (Apis mellifera) use quorum sensing to collectively choose a new nesting site when the swarm grows too large and needs to split. It is shown that the quorum sensing paradigm may be used to provide robust decentralized team coordination and collective decision-making in mobile autonomous teams performing complex tasks. In this effort quorum sensing-inspired techniques are developed and applied to the design of a decentralized controller for a team of mobile autonomous agents surveying a field containing buried landmines.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Sofge D. and Lawless W. (2011). QUORUM SENSING FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION AND DECISION-MAKING IN MOBILE AUTONOMOUS TEAMS . In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-8425-40-9, pages 195-204. DOI: 10.5220/0003122501950204

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart11,
author={Donald A. Sofge and William F. Lawless},
title={QUORUM SENSING FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION AND DECISION-MAKING IN MOBILE AUTONOMOUS TEAMS },
booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,},
year={2011},
pages={195-204},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003122501950204},
isbn={978-989-8425-40-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,
TI - QUORUM SENSING FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION AND DECISION-MAKING IN MOBILE AUTONOMOUS TEAMS
SN - 978-989-8425-40-9
AU - Sofge D.
AU - Lawless W.
PY - 2011
SP - 195
EP - 204
DO - 10.5220/0003122501950204