Cooperative Decision-Making in Decentralized Multiple-Robot Systems: The Best-of-N Problem
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Multiple-robot systems (MRS) that are decentrally organized have many benefits over centralized systems. Decentralized systems are less affected by computational and communicative bottlenecks, and they are more robust to the loss of individual member robots. System-level cognitive operations, though, are much more difficult to implement in decentralized systems. One example is the best-of-N decision-making problem, in which a team attempts to unanimously select a single alternative from a list that maximizes a given metric. This is a valuable operation, since many system-level operations can be expressed in this form. Optimal best-of-N decision-making, however, is intractable in large decentralized systems. The contribution of this paper is a biologically inspired algorithm that enables a decentralized MRS composed of very simple robots to make good, unanimous decisions. In a series of physical experiments using real robots, the best decision was made at least 80% of the time. In all, 100% of the decisions achieved perfect consensus, which prevented the MRS from becoming fragmented. The decisions are made using anonymous, local communication, with no direct comparisons of the available alternatives by the individual robots.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it