How Swarms Differ: Challenges in Collective Behaviour Comparison

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Jesus, André Fialho, Kuckling, Jonas
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Jesus, André Fialho
Kuckling, Jonas
author_facet Jesus, André Fialho
Kuckling, Jonas
contents Collective behaviours often need to be expressed through numerical features, e.g., for classification or imitation learning. This problem is often addressed by proposing an ad-hoc feature set for a particular swarm behaviour context, usually without further consideration of the solution's resilience outside of the conceived context. Yet, the development of automatic methods to design swarm behaviours is dependent on the ability to measure quantitatively the similarity of swarm behaviours. Hence, we investigate the impact of feature sets for collective behaviours. We select swarm feature sets and similarity measures from prior swarm robotics works, which mainly considered a narrow behavioural context and assess their robustness. We demonstrate that the interplay of feature set and similarity measure makes some combinations more suitable to distinguish groups of similar behaviours. We also propose a self-organised map-based approach to identify regions of the feature space where behaviours cannot be easily distinguished.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_13016
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Swarms Differ: Challenges in Collective Behaviour Comparison
Jesus, André Fialho
Kuckling, Jonas
Robotics
Collective behaviours often need to be expressed through numerical features, e.g., for classification or imitation learning. This problem is often addressed by proposing an ad-hoc feature set for a particular swarm behaviour context, usually without further consideration of the solution's resilience outside of the conceived context. Yet, the development of automatic methods to design swarm behaviours is dependent on the ability to measure quantitatively the similarity of swarm behaviours. Hence, we investigate the impact of feature sets for collective behaviours. We select swarm feature sets and similarity measures from prior swarm robotics works, which mainly considered a narrow behavioural context and assess their robustness. We demonstrate that the interplay of feature set and similarity measure makes some combinations more suitable to distinguish groups of similar behaviours. We also propose a self-organised map-based approach to identify regions of the feature space where behaviours cannot be easily distinguished.
title How Swarms Differ: Challenges in Collective Behaviour Comparison
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13016