Predicting the impact of communication outages in swarm collective perception

We present an application of a recently introduced information-theoretic com- plexity measure for predicting the impact which obstacles to swarm communication have on swarm performance in the collective perceptual discrimination task. Our formalism is built on the notion of Empowerment – a task-independent, universal and generic utility function, which characterizes the level of perceivable control an embodied agent has over its environment. We conducted series of simulations with an empowerment model of the collective perception scenario, including simple communication obstacles of the same size and shape placed in vary- ing positions and/or orientations in one particular environmental pattern used previously for assessing collective decision-making. The results indicate the potential detrimental impact com- munication disruptions in particular locations of the arena could have on swarm performance, while suggesting no effect when the same obstacles are placed elsewhere. Such analysis could provide a characterization of critical spots in the arena for a given environmental pattern.