Emergent naming conventions in a foraging robot swarm

In this study, we investigate the emergence of naming conventions within a swarm of robots that collectively forage, that is, collect resources from multiple sources in the environment. While foraging, the swarm explores the environment and makes a collective decision on how to exploit the available resources, either by selecting a single source or concurrently exploiting more than one. At the same time, the robots locally exchange messages in order to agree on how to name each source. Here, we study the correlation between the task-induced interaction network and the emergent naming conventions. In particular, our goal is to determine whether the dynamics of the interaction network are sufficient to determine an emergent vocabulary that is potentially useful to the robot swarm. To be useful, linguistic conventions need to be compact and meaningful, that is, to be the minimal description of the relevant features of the environment and of the made collective decision. We show that, in order to obtain a useful vocabulary, the task-dependent interaction network alone is not sufficient, but it must be combined with a correlation between language and foraging dynamics. On the basis of these results, we propose a decentralised algorithm for collective categorisation which enables the swarm to achieve a useful-compact and meaningful-naming of all the available sources. Understanding how useful linguistic conventions emerge contributes to the design of robot swarms with potentially improved autonomy, flexibility, and self-awareness.