The effect of uneven and obstructed site layouts in best-of-N

Abstract

Biologically inspired collective decision-making algorithms show promise for implementing spatially distributed searching tasks with robotic systems. One example is the best-of-N problem in which a collective must search an environment for an unknown number of sites and select the best option. Real-world robotic deployments must achieve acceptable success rates and execution times across a wide variety of environmental conditions, a property known as resilience. Existing experiments for the best-of-N problem have not explicitly examined how the site layout affects a collective’s performance and resilience. Two novel resilience metrics are used to compare algorithmic performance and resilience between evenly distributed, obstructed, or unobstructed uneven site configurations. Obstructing the highest valued site negatively affected selection accuracy for both algorithms, while uneven site distribution had no effect on either algorithm’s resilience. The results also illuminate the distinction between absolute resilience as measured against an objective standard, and relative resilience used to compare an algorithm’s performance across different operating conditions.