Stochastic Filtering for Quorum Sensing in Robot Swarms under Anonymous Communication
A new study from arXiv proposes a stochastic filtering protocol (ANTk) for quorum sensing in robot swarms that use anonymous communication. The protocol mitigates double-counting bias common in anonymous protocols, improving estimate stability, though it increases error recovery time. The research compares ANTk with baseline and randomized variants, revealing trade-offs in accuracy, speed, and stability.
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[Submitted on 15 Jul 2026]
Title:Stochastic Filtering for Quorum Sensing in Robot Swarms under Anonymous Communication
View a PDF of the paper titled Stochastic Filtering for Quorum Sensing in Robot Swarms under Anonymous Communication, by Fabio Oddi and 2 other authors
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Abstract:Quorum Sensing (QS) is a key capability for robot swarms, useful for coordination of activities at the group level. Effective communication is instrumental for individuals to estimate the quorum level of the entire swarm. Anonymous communication protocols where individuals exchange local information without revealing unique identities are helpful to support quorum estimates by sampling information from neighbours and maintain scalability of the QS process. However, because anonymous protocols cannot distinguish message sources, repeated messages from the same sender may be double-counted, thereby biasing collective quorum estimates. In this study, we introduce a stochastic filtering protocol inspired by $k$-priority sampling to improve estimate stability (\ANTk), and we compare it with a baseline anonymous protocols (\AN) and a randomised variant designed to improve accuracy (\ANT). We find that the baseline protocol \AN provides a parsimonious and fast solution, but remains highly inaccurate due to double-counting bias. The \ANT variant improves accuracy but suffers from information inertia, resulting in slower convergence. Finally, actively filtering the message buffer via the \ANTk protocol successfully decreases temporary errors and stabilises the estimate, at the cost of an increased time of recovery from errors.
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)
Cite as: arXiv:2607.14262 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2607.14262v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.14262
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Fabio Oddi [view email] [v1] Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:16:26 UTC (293 KB)
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