ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with an unusual predicament: a colleague’s bedroom wall has been taken over by a nest of feral bees. Removing them offers an immersive look at collective behavior, in which relatively simple actions at the individual level add up to complex group decision-making and behavior, like the seemingly choreographed movements of schooling fish or starlings in flight. These behaviors are of keen interest to biomimetic researchers of robotic control systems, who often invoke the term “emergence” in describing the mysterious way complexity arises from a set of initially simple ground rules. More broadly, there are strongly emergent phenomena—consciousness might be one, wildness might be another—that cannot be reduced to their constituent components. With “strong” and “weak” emergence in mind, the book visits the Arizona State University researcher Stephen Pratt, who studies such behavior in ants and is collaborating with robotics colleagues to bring the organizational logic of the ant colony to robotic design. The chapter then visits Magnus Egerstedt, who directs the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech and is the creator of the Robotarium. He envisions this specially designed amphitheater as a “24-hour ecosystem” where a swarm of a hundred small robots perch on chargers, waiting for instructions from researchers who might be halfway around the globe. The book offers a firsthand look at this robotic testing ground to see what happens when a “gamergate duel,” a joust between female would-be queen ants, is performed by robots.
