The Influence of Topology in Coordinating Collective Decision-Making in Bio-hybrid Societies

Collective behaviours are widespread across the animal kingdom, many of which result from self-organised processes, making it difficult to understand the individual behaviours that give rise to such results. One method to improve our understanding is to develop bio-hybrid societies, in which robots and animals interact, combining elements whose behaviours are under our control (robots) with elements that are not (animals). Recent work has shown that a bio-hybrid society comprising simulated robots and honeybees is able to reach collective decisions that are the product of self-organisation among the robots and the bees, and that these decisions can be coordinated across multiple groups that reside in distinct habitats via robot–robot communication. Here we examine how sensitive the collective decision-making is to the specific topologies of information sharing in such bio-hybrid societies, using agent-based simulation modelling. We find that collective decision-making across multiple groups occupying distinct habitats is possible for a range of inter-habitat interaction topologies, where the rate of coordinated outcomes has a positive relationship with the number of inter-habitat links. This indicates that system-wide coordination states are relatively robust and do not require as strong inter-habitat coupling as had previously been used.