Self-organizing sensors by deterministic annealing

Proposes a new method of robot self-organization for a class of robotic tasks which cannot be carried out by a single robot but must be carried out by a group of robots. The authors make use of a deterministic 'reverse' annealing clustering method based on a maximum-minimum entropy solution. They show that this reverse annealing method, which results in a better way of escaping local minima than other fuzzy clustering methods, is well suited to applications in distributed robotics since it provides a natural way of following the self-organizing evolution of a system of robots. In particular, two opposite classes of self-organizing behavior are studied: the self-organization 'from few groups to many units' and the self-organization 'from many units to a few groups'.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>