Natural and synthetic interactions in networks of insects and insect-like microrobots
speaker: José Halloy (Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB))abstract: Collective behaviour and decision-making based on self-organisation are demonstrated in eusocial insects, gregarious arthropods and vertebrates. These biological findings have stimulated engineers to investigate novel approaches for the coordination of autonomous multi-robot systems based on self-organization. Here we show that robots can be integrated into the collective decision-making process of cockroaches and used as social lures to modify their natural group behaviour. This integration process is based on the acceptance of the robot by the cockroaches. Acceptance was achieved by conditioning the robots with the cockroach recognition pheromone while their core robotic behavioural module reproduces the cockroach reaction-decision mechanisms for shelter selection. Robots and cockroaches participate in the collective choice leading them to select a common shelter. The presence of robots introduces new regulatory feedbacks that can be tuned to produce new global patterns that would not have been observed in their absence. The mixed cockroach-robot groups can be induced to mostly prefer a shelter that would be mostly avoided by the cockroaches alone. This form of global control is based on a small number of robots that modulate the underlying non-linear dynamics. These results demonstrate the possibility of using intelligent autonomous devices to study and to control self-organized behavioural patterns in group-living animals.
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