Components of swarm intelligence

This paper discusses the successes and failures over the past three years as efforts at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) have developed and evaluated robot behaviors that promote the emergence of swarm intelligence. Using a team of 12 small robots with the ability to respond to light and sound, the INEEL has investigated the fundamental advantages of swarm behavior as well as the limitations of this approach. The paper discusses the ways in which biology has inspired this work and the ways in which adherence to the biological model has proven to be both a benefit and hindrance to developing a fieldable system. The paper outlines how a hierarchical command and control structure can be imposed in order to permit human control at a level of group abstraction and discusses experimental results that show how group performance scales as different numbers of robots are utilized. Lastly, the paper outlines the applications for which the resulting capabilities have been applied and demonstrated.