Quorum Sensing for Collective Action and Decision-making in Mobile Autonomous Teams

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

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