Abstract
In group-living animals, aggregation favours interactions and information exchanges between individuals, and thus allows the emergence of complex collective behaviors. In previous works, a model of a self-enhanced aggregation was deduced from experiments with the cockroach Blattella germanica. In the present work, this model was implemented in micro-robots Alice and successfully reproduced the agregation dynamics observed in a group of cockroaches. We showed that this aggregation process, based on a small set of simple behavioral rules of interaction, can be used by the group of robots to select collectively an aggregation site among two identical or different shelters. Moreover, we showed that the aggregation mechanism allows the robots as a group to “estimate” the size of each shelter during the collective decision-making process, a capacity which is not explicitly coded at the individual level.
This work was partly supported by a European community grant given to the Leurre project under the IST Programme (2002-2005), contract FET-OPEN-IST-2001-35506 of the Future and Emerging Technologies arm and by the Programme Cognitique from the French Ministry of Scientific Research. The authors would like to thank Jean-Louis Deneubourg for all its very helpful advices about this work.
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Garnier, S. et al. (2005). Aggregation Behaviour as a Source of Collective Decision in a Group of Cockroach-Like-Robots. In: Capcarrère, M.S., Freitas, A.A., Bentley, P.J., Johnson, C.G., Timmis, J. (eds) Advances in Artificial Life. ECAL 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3630. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11553090_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11553090_18
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