  Unraveling the nature of the communication model that governs which two
individuals in a swarm interact with each other is an important line of inquiry
in the collective behavior sciences. A number of models have been proposed in
the biological swarm literature, with the leading models being the metric,
topological, and visual models. The hypothesis evaluated in this manuscript is
whether the choice of a communication model impacts the performance of a tasked
artificial swarm. The biological models are used to design coordination
algorithms for a simulated swarm, which are evaluated over a range of six swarm
robotics tasks. Each task has an associated set of performance metrics that are
used to evaluate how the communication models fare against each other. The
general findings demonstrate that the communication model significantly affects
the swarm's performance for individual tasks, and this result implies that the
communication model-task pairing is an important consideration when designing
artificial swarms. Further analysis of each tasks' performance metrics reveal
instances in which pairwise considerations of model and one of the various
experimental factors becomes relevant. The reported research demonstrates that
the artificial swarm's task performance can be increased through the careful
selection of a communications model.
