Weekly Research Seminar Series - A Bio-Inspired Spatial Defence Strategy for Collective Decision Making in Self-Organized Swarms

We are pleased to invite you to our Weekly Research Seminar Series on Thursday, 18th November at 3pm. In this week seminar, we are pleased to have our colleague Judhi Prasetyo, presenting his research titled 'A Bio-Inspired Spatial Defence Strategy for Collective Decision Making in Self-Organized Swarms".   

Weekly Research Seminar Series            

We are pleased to invite you to our Weekly Research Seminar. It will be held online on 18th November from 3pm via Microsoft team platform. Weekly Research Seminar Series was launched in 2008 and has featured 300 presentations to date. The seminars provide a forum for researchers to share their work. Presenters include faculty from Middlesex University Dubai and other universities in the United Arab Emirates, as well as researchers from other global institutions.      

“A Bio-Inspired Spatial Defence Strategy for Collective Decision Making in Self-Organized Swarms"      

Judhi Prasetyo

Abstract          

In collective decision-making, individuals in a swarm reach consensus on a decision using only local interactions without any centralized control. In the context of the best-of-n problem - characterized by n discrete alternatives - it has been shown that consensus to the best option can be reached if individuals disseminate that option more than the other options. Besides being used as a mechanism to modulate positive feedback, long dissemination times could potentially also be used in an adversarial way, whereby adversarial swarms could infiltrate the system and propagate bad decisions using aggressive dissemination strategies. Motivated by the above scenario, in this paper we propose a bio-inspired defence strategy that allows the swarm to be resilient against options that can be disseminated for longer times. This strategy mainly consists in reducing the mobility of the agents that are associated to options disseminated for a shorter amount of time, allowing the swarm to converge to this option. We study the effectiveness of this strategy using two classical decision mechanisms, the voter model and the majority rule, showing that the majority rule is necessary in our setting for this strategy to work. The strategy has also been validated on a real Kilobots experiment.

Presenter Bio    

Judhi Prasetyo is a lecturer at the Computer Engineering and Informatics department at Middlesex University Dubai. Judhi holds a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology of Bandung (Indonesia), and a Master of Science in Engineering Management with Distinction from Middlesex University Dubai. He has been a member of the Middlesex University Dubai teaching team since 2017. His teaching and learning interests include Robotics and Physical Computing, Realtime and Embedded Systems, and Data Communications and Security. His research areas include Collective Decision Making, Autonomous Robots and Vehicles, and Data Communications and Security. Prior to joining academia, he has been providing services in the information and communication field to various verticals including government entities and law enforcement agencies in more than 15 countries.