Distributed Intelligence
Ant colonies
Ant colonies have the unique ability of finding the shortest route to the closest food source. Attributing this behavior to individual ants would require an ant to have highly cognitive features, such as the ability to deliberately navigate and explore the environment, remember landmarks for navigation to home, somehow calculating distance to food and communicating the whole trajectory to other ants in the colony.
However, one can also regard this behavior as a collective phenomenon, i.e. as an example of distributed intelligence. From this perspective, we do not need to refer to cognitive abilities of individual ants. Finding the shortest path to the closest food source can equally be achieved through the release of pheromones in the environment, upon which other ants are more likely to take the same path. The ant that returns home first with food (which is likely to be from the closest food source) will leave the strongest pheromone trail, and other ants will most likely take this route.
- See also: "Stigmergy: indirect communication in ant colonies" in Biosemiotics
(Evolution of) Flocking, Herding, Schooling Swarm robotics
Swarm robotics can be defined as the study of how a swarm of relatively simple physically embodied agents can be contructed to collectively accomplish tasks that are beyond the capabilities of a single one. Different from other studies on multi-robot systems, swarm robotics emphasizes self-organization and emergence while keeping in mind the issues of scalability and robustness. These emphases promote the use of relatively simple robots, equipped with localized sensing abilities, scalable communication mechanisms and the exploration of decentralized control strategies.
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