Trading confidence for communications

In this paper, we present a simulation study of the trade-off between the confidence or uncertainty of the information to be communicated and the range of communication in a multi-robot system. Specifically, we use the popular task of forage as the context, and study the relationship between the uncertainty in the object locations and the neighborhood size within which a robot communicates the location information to others. It is found that there is an advantage to be gained through communication with respect to task performance only if the objects are not spatially uniformly distributed in the environment, and that a design trade-off is possible when the cost in achieving accurate robot localization and that of communication range are to be balanced