From Local Interactions to Collective Intelligence

This paper describes a research program with the goal of understanding the types of simple local interactions which produce complex and purposive group behaviors1. We describe a synthetic, bottom-up approach to studying group behavior, consisting of designing and testing a variety of social interactions and scenarios with artificial agents situated in the physical world. We propose a set of basic interactions which can be used to structure and simplify the process of both designing and analyzing group behaviors. We also demonstrate how these basic interactions can be simply combined into more complex compound group behaviors. The presented behavior repertoire was developed and tested on a herd of physical mobile robots demonstrating avoiding, following, dispersing, aggregating, homing, flocking, and herding behaviors.

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