Robustness and Stagnation of a Swarm in a Cooperative Object Recognition Task

Swarm intelligent, cooperative object recognition forms part of cooperative construction research. A simulation model was designed and utilised to assess the suitability of a swarm of agents to identify and collect different objects, termed the Simplified Hexagonal Model. An agent in this system cannot assess different object types alone. Key to the efficiency of the system is avoiding stagnation whilst maintaining robustness. This paper examines the energy efficiency of the system when the probability of an agent moving away from an object it is trying to identify is varied. The probability of an agent moving away from an unidentified object per time-step was varied from 1:12 to 1:400. Both low and high probabilities increased the energy required to complete the task. This was more pronounced when using fewer agents. The reduced chance that the required number of agents were surrounding the same objects at the same time caused the increase.