[Controlling Ant-Based Construction]

Multi-agent systems Java Simulation models Date: Apr 2013

DOWNLOAD PAPER DOWNLOAD CODE
Technologies used: Java, JFreeChart, Model-View-Controller, Git

Publication:
Pitonakova, L. & Bullock, S. (2013). Controlling Ant-Based Construction. In Lio, P. et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Twelfth European Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ECAL 2013), MIT Press, 151-158.

Stigmergy allows insect colonies to collectively build structures that no single individual is fully aware of. Since relatively minimal sensory and reasoning capabilities are required of the agents, such building activity could be utilised by robotic swarms if we could learn how to control the shape of the final structures.

DOWNLOAD TALK SLIDES GET JAVA EXECUTABLE
Built structures

The paper investigates dynamics of ant nest building and shows that algorithms capable of generating ant-like structures can also be used to create nests, shapes of which are imposed from outside of the system.



{Please enable JavaScript in order to post comments}

Accepted to the ECAL 2013 A-Life conference

 The paper 'Controling Ant-Based Construction' that I recently wrote in cooperation with my supervisor Seth Bullock has now been accepted to the ECAL 2013 conference. The work is about a simulation of 2D ant nest building, where different nest shapes are made...

Foraging Strategies in Nature and Their Application to Swarm Robotics

 While foraging is a task often experimented with in swarm robotics, it is often the case that foraging strategies inspired by nature are chosen without careful consideration. Foraging strategies including solitary foraging, behavioural matching, stigmergy, signaling to guide others and coordinated and cooperative hunting are identified and their implementation costs in robots, as well as their suitability for different scenarios is discussed.

The Centralised Mindset and Complexity Science

 Humans tend to explain decentralised phenomena as being caused by a single entity. This way of thinking is often referred to as 'the centralised mindset'. Several authors propose that using programming environments where creation of decentralised agent-based systems is easy...

Boid Game-Playing through Randomised Movement

 The original boid flocking algorithm is extended by adding randomised movement to the flock members. This approach is a light-weight alternative to other ‘follow the leader’ techniques implemented in order to create a ‘game-playing’ behaviour during which a flock changes its movement direction as observed in real birds.

Ultrastable Neuroendocrine Robot Controller

 Attributes of ultrastability as an adaption mechanism in a hormone-modulated neural robot controller were investigated in a simulation. Action-selection based on hormone-driven utilities of memory items was used to alternate between mineral gathering and recharging.

pyCreeper

 The main purpose of pyCreeper is to wrap tens of lines of python code, required to produce graphs that look good for a publication, into functions. It takes away your need to understand various quirks of matplotlib and gives you back ready-to-use and well-documented code.