A tuple space for data sharing in robot swarms

In this paper, we present a system to allow a swarm of robots to agree on a set of (key,value) pairs. This system enables a form of information sharing that has the potential to be an asset for coordination in complex environments, such as globally optimized task allocation. Taking inspiration from the environment-mediated communication of social insects, we call the system virtual stigmergy. Experimental evaluation indicates that virtual stigmergy can work in a wide variety of running conditions including heavy packet loss, and can cope with random motion trajectories.