About the project
How can a robot swarm make good collective decisions when its environment is constantly changing? This project investigates adaptive and decentralised approaches to collective decision-making, enabling robot swarms to dynamically determine who should participate, how much information is needed, and when decisions should change as new evidence emerges.
Autonomous robot swarms must often make decisions collectively: where to search, which target to investigate, which route to follow, or how to allocate resources. In real environments, however, information is incomplete, conditions change and decisions that were appropriate moments ago may quickly become outdated. Requiring every robot to participate in every decision can also waste valuable resources and prevent robots from performing other tasks.
This project investigates adaptive collective decision-making in dynamic environments, building on recent work in subset-based collective decision-making. The research explores how a swarm can dynamically determine which robots should contribute to a decision, how much information is required, and when an existing collective decision should be revisited.
The project investigates decentralised approaches in which robots make decisions using local information while collectively achieving robust global behaviour. Potential research directions include:
- adaptive swarm subsets
- dynamic consensus
- information-driven participation
- uncertainty-aware decision-making
- changing environmental conditions
- conflicts between competing swarm objectives
You'll develop and evaluate algorithms using simulation and physical multi-robot platforms. Methods may include distributed algorithms probabilistic decision-making, swarm intelligence and online adaptation. The research will contribute fundamental knowledge about how collective intelligence can remain robust and responsive when both the swarm and its environment are changing. Applications could include search and rescue, environmental monitoring, exploration, autonomous logistics and other complex multi-robot missions. You'll have access to the robotic platforms available in SooratiLab including robot dogs, several ground rovers, quadcopters, robotic arms, and more.
The School of Electronics and Computer Science is committed to promoting equality, diversity inclusivity as demonstrated by our Athena SWAN award. We welcome all applicants regardless of their gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation or age, and will give full consideration to applicants seeking flexible working patterns and those who have taken a career break. The University has a generous maternity policy, onsite childcare facilities, and offers a range of benefits to help ensure employees’ well-being and work-life balance. The University of Southampton is committed to sustainability and has been awarded the Platinum EcoAward.
