Collective sorting with local communication

This paper describes an experimental study of the problem of collective sorting, in which multiple robots under simple reactive control rearrange initially randomly distributed objects of different classes into separate clusters so that each cluster contains objects of only one class. We specifically focus on the roles of three key system parameters - namely, population size, local communication among robots, and sensing range - on the performance of the collective sorting task of objects of two classes. Our experiments show that an increase in communication range has a similar positive effect on task performance as an increase in sensing range, especially when the sensing range is limited; however, this effect tends to be attenuated by the increase in the size of the robot collective.