Tropism-based cognition: a novel software architecture for agents in colonies

A novel architecture for agents in colonies has been developed in order to investigate certain forms of group interaction. Specifically, we are interested in the extent to which overall goals for a colony can be achieved when each agent is only aware of limited local goals, whether the architecture allows for emergence of unexpected behaviour, and whether explicit communication among agents facilitates or hinders task performance. The architecture supports several forms of learning. Large colonies of agents (as many as 100) have been studied in simulation experiments, where they carried out fetch-and-carry tasks in the presence of predators and with limited energy reserves. In addition, a physical colony of four agents has been fabricated with the same architecture, to ensure that the behaviours observed in simulation were also present in the hardware implementations.