On the Design of Control Mechanisms for a Site Selection Task in a Simulated Swarm of Robots

Collective decision-making refers to a decision process by a group of agents in which, once the decision is made, it cannot be attributed to any of its group members. In this study, we design decision-making mechanisms, using evolutionary methods, to allow a swarm of simulated robots to make a collective decision in a site selection scenario. That is, the robots have to reach a consensus on which site is the best among those available in the environment. The original contribution of this study is in demonstrating that the design process can be free from several assumptions, made in previous related research work, on crucial elements underpinning the individual and group-level response.