par Coucke, Nicolas 
Président du jury Klein, Olivier
Promoteur Cleeremans, Axel
Co-Promoteur Dorigo, Marco
Publication Non publié, 2024-01-30
Président du jury Klein, Olivier
Promoteur Cleeremans, Axel
Co-Promoteur Dorigo, Marco
Publication Non publié, 2024-01-30
Thèse de doctorat
| Résumé : | It’s difficult not to be amazed by the intricate process through which a honeybee swarm selects anew nest site. By exploring different options and sharing information with one another, the beescan collectively choose a single site. A key feature of these collective decisions is that they arenot directed by a centralized planner, but instead arise entirely from the interactions of individualswith each other and their environment. Inspired by such natural phenomena, roboticists are nowimplementing similar strategies in robot swarms to enhance collective decision-makingAs a social species, humans also frequently make collective decisions. Many important decisionsfor our societies are not made by a single individual but emerge from extensive verbal discussionsbetween multiple individuals. This dissertation aims to build a conceptual and experimentalbridge linking the study of human collective decision making with the more embodied collectivedecision making of animal and robotic swarms, which mostly take place through movements inphysical space. To do so, we place human participants in the type of embodied decision makingscenarios that swarms usually operate in.We created a virtual environment in which large groups of human participants can interact withone another and perform various tasks that are commonly studied in swarm robotics research. Intwo behavioral experiments, we used this virtual environment to study human behavior duringcollective decision making. In the first experiment, we studied how participants can form acollective perception of their environment by each exploring some part of the environment andthen sharing that information. In a subsequent experiment, we study how a group of participantscan select the best site in their environment while only using movement-based communication.The third study presented in this thesis reports on how human participants can implicitly signaltheir confidence in their movements during decision making in a shared physical space with otherparticipants. Lastly, motivated by theoretical considerations on the nature of embodied cognition,we employed neuro-inspired models to simulate how agents—whether humans or animals—canreach a consensus by balancing the processing of environmental, social, and internal stimuli.This thesis demonstrates how human collective decision making can be studied in embodiedcontexts. Our findings can contribute to applying human-inspired social cognition abilities torobot swarms. The experimental approach of this thesis also offers a direct method for evaluatingthe impact of swarm-inspired strategies on human collective decision-making |
