BayesCPF: Enabling Collective Perception in Robot Swarms with Degrading Sensors

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chin, Khai Yi, Pinciroli, Carlo
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Chin, Khai Yi
Pinciroli, Carlo
author_facet Chin, Khai Yi
Pinciroli, Carlo
contents The collective perception problem -- where a group of robots perceives its surroundings and comes to a consensus on an environmental state -- is a fundamental problem in swarm robotics. Past works studying collective perception use either an entire robot swarm with perfect sensing or a swarm with only a handful of malfunctioning members. A related study proposed an algorithm that does account for an entire swarm of unreliable robots but assumes that the sensor faults are known and remain constant over time. To that end, we build on that study by proposing the Bayes Collective Perception Filter (BayesCPF) that enables robots with continuously degrading sensors to accurately estimate the fill ratio -- the rate at which an environmental feature occurs. Our main contribution is the Extended Kalman Filter within the BayesCPF, which helps swarm robots calibrate for their time-varying sensor degradation. We validate our method across different degradation models, initial conditions, and environments in simulated and physical experiments. Our findings show that, regardless of degradation model assumptions, fill ratio estimation using the BayesCPF is competitive to the case if the true sensor accuracy is known, especially when assumptions regarding the model and initial sensor accuracy levels are preserved.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_04774
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BayesCPF: Enabling Collective Perception in Robot Swarms with Degrading Sensors
Chin, Khai Yi
Pinciroli, Carlo
Robotics
The collective perception problem -- where a group of robots perceives its surroundings and comes to a consensus on an environmental state -- is a fundamental problem in swarm robotics. Past works studying collective perception use either an entire robot swarm with perfect sensing or a swarm with only a handful of malfunctioning members. A related study proposed an algorithm that does account for an entire swarm of unreliable robots but assumes that the sensor faults are known and remain constant over time. To that end, we build on that study by proposing the Bayes Collective Perception Filter (BayesCPF) that enables robots with continuously degrading sensors to accurately estimate the fill ratio -- the rate at which an environmental feature occurs. Our main contribution is the Extended Kalman Filter within the BayesCPF, which helps swarm robots calibrate for their time-varying sensor degradation. We validate our method across different degradation models, initial conditions, and environments in simulated and physical experiments. Our findings show that, regardless of degradation model assumptions, fill ratio estimation using the BayesCPF is competitive to the case if the true sensor accuracy is known, especially when assumptions regarding the model and initial sensor accuracy levels are preserved.
title BayesCPF: Enabling Collective Perception in Robot Swarms with Degrading Sensors
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04774