Designing emergent collective behaviours: application to a tumour extraction

Abstract

Summary form only given. This paper proposes a methodology named "Cirta" for specifying and designing collective behaviours of miniature robots. This methodology is based on the minirobots' local and dynamic interactions mediated by the dynamics of the environment. We use a logical language to describe how complex collective behaviours could emerge as spatio-temporal patterns of interactions among situated minirobots and with the environment. It leads to derive individuals (robots) abilities in terms of sensory-motor or stimulus-response pairs. The resulted strategies and the schemes of interaction patterns are then instantiated to emerge coherent and global behavioural structures. In this paper, the methodology is applied to specify an emergent collective behaviour of a tumour extraction by a group of robots. In particular, we are able to specify the perception of a property of the environment by a robot as a set of possible collective patterns of interactions.