Experiments in emergent collaboration in swarms of simple agents

For many important applications, it would be particularly valuable if large numbers of relatively simple (i.e. unintelligent) agents could be induced to collaborate in the performance of tasks in environments in which a high degree of uncertainty is the norm, and the ability to adapt is therefore a requirement. For this reason, interest in emergent or "swarming" approaches to agent collaboration has been increasing in recent years. We have recently explored two approaches to engineering such systems-cofields and coupled oscillators. Our experiments have shown the efficacy of each of these approaches in producing collections of individually simple agents that exhibit emergent, adaptive collaboration in the performance of complex tasks, such as path finding, resource allocation, and fault tolerance