Influencing Emergent Self-Assembled Structures in Robotic Collectives Through Traffic Control

Multiagent self-assembly allows collectives to reach areas otherwise inaccessible to any particular agent. However, the coordination of this collective is not trivial, so each agent's position in the structure is usually determined apriori. In our approach, we take inspiration from army ants and use a simulated model of the Eciton Robotica robot [4] to form emergent structures with bio-inspired local rules. We demonstrate that by coupling this with traffic control, we can induce the formation of a structure and control certain characteristics without pre-computed paths or central coordination.