Self-Organized Collective Decision-Making in Swarms of Autonomous Robots

In my Ph.D. thesis, I focus on the design and mathematical modeling of collective decision-making mechanisms for swarm of autonomous robots. In particular, most of the attention of my studies concerns collective decision-making problems that are characterized by a discrete and finite number of possible alternatives (e.g., the best-of-n decision problem discussed in Section 2). The aim of my studies is to develop mathematical models that enable designers to study collective decision-making mechanisms across different levels of abstraction: from mean field approximations that permit the study of asymptotic properties, to stochastic mathematical models that account for finite-size effects, and therefore, allow designer to predict the performance of actual systems.