Minimalist Protocols for Quorum Sensing in Robot Swarms

Quorum sensing is a key mechanism enabling coordinated behaviour in populations of autonomous agents, and is extensively studied in biological systems spanning from bacteria populations to social insects. In swarm robotics too, quorum sensing aroused much interest, but remained mostly constrained to the implementation of collective decisions. Here, we propose protocols to estimate the quorum level that are suitable for resource-constrained robots, and evaluate the precision and speed of the quorum assessment across a large spectrum of swarm state conditions. Through systematic experimentation, we evaluate the proposed protocols for different swarm densities and working area sizes. Our findings shed light on the trade-off between computational requirements and expected performance, aiding in the selection of appropriate quorum sensing protocols for future swarm robotics research.