Uploaded May 2015 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
The Year of CoCoRo 22/52: In this experiment a swarm of Lily robots has to find a magnetic target on the ground. This is made difficult by water currents that make single robots drift away after they have found the target. By recruiting other robots to this location with blue-light blinks a larger group can be formed at the target site. This stabilizes the swarm at that location, thus preventing the unwanted drifting away. In addition, several weak magnetic field spots (local optima) make it even more difficult for the swarm to find and aggregate at the right (strong) magnetic target spot. Collectively the robots manage to solve the task following a very simple behavioral program and a 1-bit communication principle. This shows that very simple agents can manage to perform complex tasks together without any global knowledge available to them.
The Year of CoCoRo 22/52: In this experiment a swarm of Lily robots has to find a magnetic target on the ground. This is made difficult by water currents that make single robots drift away after they have found the target. By recruiting other robots to this location with blue-light blinks a larger group can be formed at the target site. This stabilizes the swarm at that location, thus preventing the unwanted drifting away. In addition, several weak magnetic field spots (local optima) make it even more difficult for the swarm to find and aggregate at the right (strong) magnetic target spot. Collectively the robots manage to solve the task following a very simple behavioral program and a 1-bit communication principle. This shows that very simple agents can manage to perform complex tasks together without any global knowledge available to them.
