Emergent Cooperative Behavior for Multirobot Systems

Individual's behavior inside a multirobot is inherently unpredictable because the global behavior of the whole system relies on local interactions among group members. The configuration of the environment, namely robot's relative positions inside the group, plays a crucial role in satisfying the global goal. We have introduced a set of macroscopic parameters that allow to evaluate the evolution of the multirobot system. They depend on both the global goal and the environment dynamics providing a form of implicit communication among the robots. Thus, robots communicate implicitly their intention to be involved in complex actions. Other group members become simply aware of it by recognizing configuration pattern of the environment. An application to simulating football game can be realized by triggering the arbitration mechanism over the whole behavior set to generate as many as possible situations favourable to score a goal.