A constitution and an economic model for the organisation and emergence of collective behaviour in a colony of robots

The paper presents an organisational model favouring the emergence of collective behaviour for a colony of robots. The model has been implemented with a colony of six locally built autonomous walking robots. We are particularly interested by the emergence of reactions among the group of individually aware robots. This choice requires an understanding of individual and inter-individual behaviour which allows the appearance and the maintenance of collective dynamics even though none of the agents is capable of conceiving this dynamics alone. We have studied the simplest of all economic models, in which goods have already been produced, and in which, to survive, each robot must satisfy its own needs by collecting ore, which is exchanged for a given amount of wealth.