Language Evolution in Swarm Robotics: A Perspective

Abstract

While direct local communication is very important for the organization of robot swarms, so far it has mostly been used for relatively simple tasks such as signaling robots preferences or states. Inspired by the emergence of meaning found in natural languages, more complex communication skills could allow robot swarms to tackle novel situations in ways that may not be a priori obvious to the experimenter. This would pave the way for the design of robot swarms with higher autonomy and adaptivity. The state of the art regarding the emergence of communication for robot swarms has mostly focused on offline evolutionary approaches, which showed that signaling and communication can emerge spontaneously even when not explicitly promoted. However, these approaches do not lead to complex, language-like communication skills, and signals are tightly linked to environmental and/or sensory-motor states that are specific to the task for which communication was evolved. To move beyond current practice, we advocate an approach to emergent communication in robot swarms based on language games. Thanks to language games, previous studies showed that cultural self-organization-rather than biological evolution-can be responsible for the complexity and expressive power of language. We suggest that swarm robotics can be an ideal test-bed to advance research on the emergence of language-like communication. The latter can be key to provide robot swarms with additional skills to support self-organization and adaptivity, enabling the design of more complex collective behaviors.

Swarm Robotics: A Perspective on the Latest Reviewed Concepts and Applications

“…Our research also brings an additional set of features from SR applications: The robots of the swarm are comparatively small and low-cost [ 28 , 29 , 30 ]. The robots should be independent, with the potential to understand and manage in an actual environment by themselves [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 32 ]. In theory, the robots should all be equal.…”

“…This means they inevitably must work together to solve the problem [ 14 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 ]. The swarm is decentralized, self-organized, and distributed [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 ]. The norms controlling the swarm agents are commonly simple and executed individually, likewise to the collaborative behavior usually seen in nature, and capable of generating a wide collection of compound collective behaviors [ 14 , 27 , 29 , 30 ].…”

“…The robots should be independent, with the potential to understand and manage in an actual environment by themselves [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 32 ].…”

“…Cambier et al [ 32 ] approach another significant topic in SR: communication. This feature relates directly to the capability of self-organization in swarms.…”

“…Flexibility: The systems must be flexible. In other words, they must serve multiple purposes and tasks, even with restricted communication and perception resources [14,28,30,32]. • Scalability: The system must be functional with a different number of elements.…”