Making Collective Behaviours to work through Implicit Communication

The aim of this paper is to investigate how stigmergic information allow each individual of a group of autonomous robots to take advantages from other individual behaviors. The proposed analysis is based on the roboticle model where sensor data and effector commands are treated as energy exchange between the robot and its environment, eventually populated by other robots. Without explicit communication, the collective behavior of a group of teammates can be forced only if the robot designer makes each robot to become aware of distinguishing configuration patterns in the environment. Usually, the job is accomplished both by evaluating descriptive conditions as macroparameters and an appropriate dynamic role assignment among teammates. Since observed individual behaviors can affect the normal course of operations for each robot propagating to other teammates, we want to address some issues on how a collective behavior is fired and maintained.