The Impact of Informed Individuals on Collective Object Sorting

In this presentation preliminary evidence will be shown to indicate that a minority of informed individuals can influence the collective behaviour of their peers in the distributed object sorting task. From the applications standpoint this suggests that the collective decisions as to where a robot swarm places its clusters of sorted materials can be governed by informing only a minority of robots. This is the first study that integrates a priori knowledge for a proportion of robots in this task. [Note: This work has not yet been submitted for publication. A paper describing the cache consensus algorithm that is modified for these experiments is under review.]