Robust distributed decision-making in robot swarms

Reaching an optimal shared decision in a distributed way is a key aspect of many multi-agent and swarm robotic applications. As humans, we often have to come to some conclusions about the current state of the world so that we can make informed decisions and then act in a way that will achieve some desired state of the world. Of course, expecting every person to have perfect, up-to-date knowledge about the current state of the world is unrealistic, and so we often rely on the beliefs and experiences of others to inform our own beliefs. We see this too in nature, where honey bees must choose between a large number of potential nesting sites in order to select the best one. When a current hive grows too large, the majority of bees must choose a new site to relocate to via a process called "swarming" – a problem that can be generalised to choosing the best of a given number of choices.