Self-organization of sensors for swarm intelligence

The realization of sensing swarms composed of value-specific sensing elements requires distributed cooperation among the members of the swarm. The number of value-specific sensing elements must change under changing external conditions. The recalculations of the optimal distribution of sensing elements can be carried out from the knowledge of the (changed) average value of the sensed feature. Mathematically this can be done by using the maximum-entropy principle. However, distribution operation requires solving two additional problems: the new average value must be known to each sensing element, and a new configuration must be achieved autonomously (i.e. under distributed control). For the solution to these problems the authors introduce a circulating swarm model in which the elements of the swarm circulate in a ring while performing the sensing operations and the self-organization. They show which elementary operations can be used in an algorithm for self-organization of the swarm in a new configuration optimized for sensing