One, Few, Many: How the Number of Cooperating Agents Affects Strategies for Self-Organized Behavior

Integrating solar and wind generation into the electrical grid, developing the next generation of mobile communications infrastructure, and adaptively controlling the traffic flow in a large city at rush hour all have a common challenge: integration of large and variable numbers of independent heterogeneous devices, some of which may not even exist at design time.  For such complex and interconnected systems, complexity itself is a central technical challenge.

The natural world provides a wealth of examples of ensembles of heterogeneous components which collectively exhibit determinate and reproducable behavior.  These examples demonstrate that self-organization is possible, but it is not yet clear how best to achieve such results in our engineered systems.  Results from our testbed of small robotic vehicles suggest that the properties and capabilities appropriate for integrating a few agents may be significantly different from those that enable desired self-organized behaviors of ensembles of large numbers of agents.