A Thermodynamic Framework for Robot Colony Control

In the last decade the development of multirobot systems has shown with growing evidence how a well-balanced deliberative-reactive coordination is the key issue to provide the group with an efficient and robust collective behavior. Usually, but not necessarily, deliberation is linked to the planning dynamical role exchange whereas reactivity is associated with the ability of the system to stress any condition which could fertilize cooperation. Using a chemical metaphor we could say that reactive cooperation should emerge from the interaction between individiduals through an appropriate catalyst whose availability increases as cooperation increases. In the paper we present an attempt to satisfy the constraint by maintaining at the subsymbolic level, as long as it is possible, all the relevant information to coordinate a multirobot system. To this aim we model the group of robots using the roboticle framework and we assume a thermal metaphor where temperature and conductivity are the quantities which trigger the individual dynamics to make emerging the collective behavior of the group.