Stigmergy and State Sharing (S3): Achieving Collective Goals through Individual Robot Behaviors

With the increased availability of unmanned vehicles, swarming technology can potentially provide a major strategic advantage to the U.S. military.However, effective autonomous swarm control requires the solution of a difficult problem: given a desired collective behavior for achieving some goal, automatically generate a set of individual robot behaviors that will cause the collective behavior to emerge within the swarm.To address this problem, Intelligent Automation, Inc., is developing an approach for automated robot swarm behavior generation and control through the mechanisms of stigmergy and state sharing (S3).Stigmergy is defined as indirect communication through the environment, where a robot determines its action simply based on the observed actions of nearby robots.State sharing allows each robot to update its state based on the states of nearby robots; in turn, state affects which stigmergic rules are applied, allowing for effective coordination in both space and time.In Phase I, we developed a behavioral rule compiler for automatically generating stigmergic and state sharing behaviors, and proved its feasibility through simulation.In Phase II, we will further develop the capabilities, and then deploy and evaluate them in swarms of physical robots that use local sensing and communication.