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Register a new userInformation Transfer in Swarms with Leaders
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Added by
Walter Lasecki
Publication date
2014
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Swarm dynamics is the study of collections of agents that interact with one another without central control. In natural systems, insects, birds, fish and other large mammals function in larger units to increase the overall fitness of the individuals. Their behavior is coordinated through local interactions to enhance mate selection, predator detection, migratory route identification and so forth [Andersson and Wallander 2003; Buhl et al. 2006; Nagy et al. 2010; Partridge 1982; Sumpter et al. 2008]. In artificial systems, swarms of autonomous agents can augment human activities such as search and rescue, and environmental monitoring by covering large areas with multiple nodes [Alami et al. 2007; Caruso et al. 2008; Ogren et al. 2004; Paley et al. 2007; Sibley et al. 2002]. In this paper, we explore the interplay between swarm dynamics, covert leadership and theoretical information transfer. A leader is a member of the swarm that acts upon information in addition to what is provided by local interactions. Depending upon the leadership model, leaders can use their external information either all the time or in response to local conditions [Couzin et al. 2005; Sun et al. 2013]. A covert leader is a leader that is treated no differently than others in the swarm, so leaders and followers participate equally in whatever interaction model is used [Rossi et al. 2007]. In this study, we use theoretical information transfer as a means of analyzing swarm interactions to explore whether or not it is possible to distinguish between followers and leaders based on interactions within the swarm. We find that covert leaders can be distinguished from followers in a swarm because they receive less transfer entropy than followers.
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To infer information flow in any network of agents, it is important first and foremost to establish causal temporal relations between the nodes. Practical and automated methods that can infer causality are difficult to find, and the subject of ongoing research. While Shannon information only detects correlation, there are several information-theoretic notions of directed information that have successfully detected causality in some systems, in particular in the neuroscience community. However, recent work has shown that some directed information measures can sometimes inadequately estimate the extent of causal relations, or even fail to identify existing cause-effect relations between components of systems, especially if neurons contribute in a cryptographic manner to influence the effector neuron. Here, we test how often cryptographic logic emerges in an evolutionary process that generates artificial neural circuits for two fundamental cognitive tasks: motion detection and sound localization. We also test whether activity time-series recorded from behaving digital brains can infer information flow using the transfer entropy concept, when compared to a ground-truth model of causal influence constructed from connectivity and circuit logic. Our results suggest that transfer entropy will sometimes fail to infer causality when it exists, and sometimes suggest a causal connection when there is none. However, the extent of incorrect inference strongly depends on the cognitive task considered. These results emphasize the importance of understanding the fundamental logic processes that contribute to information flow in cognitive processing, and quantifying their relevance in any given nervous system.
In swarm robotics, any of the robots in a swarm may be affected by different faults, resulting in significant performance declines. To allow fault recovery from randomly injected faults to different robots in a swarm, a model-free approach may be preferable due to the accumulation of faults in models and the difficulty to predict the behaviour of neighbouring robots. One model-free approach to fault recovery involves two phases: during simulation, a quality-diversity algorithm evolves a behaviourally diverse archive of controllers; during the target application, a search for the best controller is initiated after fault injection. In quality-diversity algorithms, the choice of the behavioural descriptor is a key design choice that determines the quality of the evolved archives, and therefore the fault recovery performance. Although the environment is an important determinant of behaviour, the impact of environmental diversity is often ignored in the choice of a suitable behavioural descriptor. This study compares different behavioural descriptors, including two generic descriptors that work on a wide range of tasks, one hand-coded descriptor which fits the domain of interest, and one novel type of descriptor based on environmental diversity, which we call Quality-Environment-Diversity (QED). Results demonstrate that the above-mentioned model-free approach to fault recovery is feasible in the context of swarm robotics, reducing the fault impact by a factor 2-3. Further, the environmental diversity obtained with QED yields a unique behavioural diversity profile that allows it to recover from high-impact faults.
Navigating networked robot swarms often requires knowing where to go, sensing the environment, and path-planning based on the destination and barriers in the environment. Such a process is computationally intensive. Moreover, as the network scales up, the computational load increases quadratically, or even exponentially. Unlike these man-made systems, most biological systems scale linearly in complexity. Furthermore, the scale of a biological swarm can even enable collective intelligence. One example comes from observations of golden shiner fish. Golden shiners naturally prefer darkness and school together. Each individual golden shiner does not know where the darkness is. Neither does it sense the light gradients in the environment. However, by moving together as a school, they always end up in the shady area. We apply such collective intelligence learned from golden shiner fish to navigating robot swarms. Each individual robots dynamic is based on the gold shiners movement strategy---a random walk with its speed modulated by the light intensity and its direction affected by its neighbors. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that our method 1) promises to navigate a robot swarm with little situational knowledge, 2) simplifies control and decision-making for each individual robot, 3) requires minimal or even no information exchange within the swarm, and 4) is highly distributed, adaptive, and robust.
In this paper, we propose SwarmNet -- a neural network architecture that can learn to predict and imitate the behavior of an observed swarm of agents in a centralized manner. Tested on artificially generated swarm motion data, the network achieves high levels of prediction accuracy and imitation authenticity. We compare our model to previous approaches for modelling interaction systems and show how modifying components of other models gradually approaches the performance of ours. Finally, we also discuss an extension of SwarmNet that can deal with nondeterministic, noisy, and uncertain environments, as often found in robotics applications.
We study the optimality conditions of information transfer in systems with memory in the low signal-to-noise ratio regime of vanishing input amplitude. We find that the optimal mutual information is represented by a maximum-variance of the signal time course, with correlation structure determined by the Fisher information matrix. We provide illustration of the method on a simple biologically-inspired model of electro-sensory neuron. Our general results apply also to the study of information transfer in single neurons subject to weak stimulation, with implications to the problem of coding efficiency in biological systems.
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