Building adaptive structure formations with decentralised control and coordination
Jan Wessnitzer, Chris Melhuish · 2005
We investigate collective decentralised decision-making in simple mobile agents engaged in the task of structure formation where the radius of the formed structure is much larger than the communication radius of an individual agent. We are searching for minimal and local rules allowing adaptive behaviour in collectives of mobile agents. In previous experiments, we presented rules that govern the evolution of the inter-agent communication network toward some task-specific topologies that allow a decentralised collective of mobile agents to dynamically organise into simple geometric structures. In this paper, we study the problem of coordinating and controlling the global behaviour of the group of agents from their local interactions. The agents determine the successful termination of a structure formation and switch to another formation. In simulation we demonstrate global state changes and global state persistance in a decentralised collective of mobile agents.