Cooperative self-organization to design robust and adaptive collectives

This paper highlights the benefits of using cooperation as the engine of adaptation and robustness for multiagent systems. Our work is based on the AMAS (Adaptive Multi-Agent System) approach which considers cooperation as a self-organization mechanism to obtain adequate emergent global behaviors for systems coupled with complex and dynamic environments. A multi-robot resource transportation task illustrates the instantiation of a cooperative agent model equipped with both reactive and anticipative cooperation rules. Various experiments underline the relevance of this approach in difficult static or dynamic environments.