Social Odometry: Imitation Based Odometry in Collective Robotics

The improvement of odometry systems in collective robotics remains an important challenge for severalapplications. Social odometry is an online social dynamics which confers the robots the possibility to learn fromthe others. Robots neither share any movement constraint nor access to centralized information. Each robot hasan estimate of its own location and an associated confidence level that decreases with distance traveled. Socialodometry guides a robot to its goal by imitating estimated locations, confidence levels and actual locations of itsneighbors. This simple online social form of odometry is shown to produce a self-organized collective patternwhich allows a group of robots to both increase the quality of individuals’ estimates and efficiently improve theircollective performance