Emergent Collective Behaviour and Swarm Robotics

10 important questions on Emergent Collective Behaviour and Swarm Robotics

What is emergent collective behaviour?

Some animal societies display coordinated and purposeful navigation of several individuals (from tens of thousands). Each individual uses only local information about the presence of other individuals and of the environment. There is no predefined leader. In some cases there is a leader and more restrictive rules on relative motion (like caterpillars all in a train), but individuals still use local information to decide how to move.

What did Bonabeau et al say in Swarm Intelligence, 1999?

'Self-organisation is a set of dynamical mechanisms whereby structures appear at the global level of a system from interactions of its lower-level components.'

How does human intelligence benefit from social interaction?

Evaluating, comparing, and imitating one another, learning from experience and emulating the successful behaviours of others, people are able to adapt to complex environments through the discovery of relatively optimal patterns of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours. (Kennedy & Eberhart, 2001).
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How do culture and cognition relate to human sociality?

Culture and cognition are inseparable consequences of sociality. Culture emerges as individuals become more similar through mutual social learning. The sweep of culture moves individuals towards more adaptive patterns of thought and behaviour.

What are some examples of emergent collective behaviour?

  • group foraging of social insects
  • cooperative transportation
  • division of labour
  • nest-building of social insects
  • collective sorting and clustering

What are the main principles of swarm intelligence?

  • The swarm can solve complex problems that a single individual with simple abilities (computational of physical) could not move.
  • The swarm is composed of several individuals, some of which may be lost or make mistakes but its performance is not affected.
  • Individuals in a swarm have local sensory information, perform simple actions, have little/no memory; they do not know the global state of the swarm of its goal.

Why do we care about swarms?

  • distributed system of interacting autonomous agents
  • goals: performance optimisation & robustness
  • self-organised (decentralised) control

Why are swarms interesting for Robotics/Artificial Intelligence?

Main interest in synthesis:
  • self-organisation
  • self-reproduction
  • self-healing
  • self-configuring
Construction

Why are swarms interesting for Biology/Sociology?

Main interest in analysis:
  • pattern recognition
  • minimal conditions
  • not 'what' but 'why'
Modeling

What is the goal of flocking?

  • Simulate a flock in computer animation.
  • A flock is a group of objects that exhibit the general class of polarised (aligned), non-colliding, aggregate motion.
  • A flock is composed of boids.
  • A boid is a simulated bird-like object.

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