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8.9 End Notes 8 Multi-agents

For further reading.
Chapter 9, “Social Behavior,” of Behavior-Based Robotics by Ron Arkin has a detailed
and comprehensive presentation of the ethology, philosophical considerations, and
different robot architectures for multi-agents. It is well worth reading.

Swarms and flocks.
The references to swarm robots are too numerous to cite here; many papers explore
details of insect behavior and coordination strategies as well as provide simulations.
Jean-Louis Deneubourg has produced many interesting articles synthesizing insights
form insect colonies into a form useful for programming mobile robots. As noted
in Behavior-Based Robotics, Craig Reynolds’ work in computer graphic simulation of
flocks of in “Flocks, herds, and schools: A distributed behavior model,” in Computer
Graphics, 1987, showed how flocks emerge from simple, individual interactions.

“Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: The Movie.”
The term “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control” later became the title of a 1997 award-
winning documentary by Errol Morris on four men, including Rodney Brooks. The
movie title implied that Morris saw human kind shifting from highly individualistic
relations with the world developed over time (as seen by the lion tamer and topiary
gardener) to decentralized, reactive mobs. Although the movie is not about robotics
per se, it features interviews with Brooks and contains stunning shots of some of
Brooks’ robots walking over broken glass, shining like diamonds in the bright lights.
Maja Mataric, one of Brooks’ students at the time of the filming, can be seen in one of
the shots wearing shorts.

Languages for multi-agents.
Researchers are beginning to work on languages for multi-agent coordination, in-
cluding Holly Yanco and Lynn Stein at MIT.

Robot soccer.
There is some dispute over which competition was the first robot soccer competi-
tion: MIROSOT or RoboCup. RoboCup was originally proposed by Minoru Asada,
a noted Japanese researcher in visually guided mobile robots, in 1995 for the 1997 IJ-
CAI, giving researchers two years to prepare. Hiroaki Kitano has been responsible for
much of the organization of the competition and funding from the Sony Corporation
(among others). MIROSOT was started by Jong-Kwan Kim in Korea in 1996, a year
after RoboCup was announced but a year before the first official RoboCup game.

Robot name trivia.
More robots are being named after women these days. The robots in Lynne Parker’s
laboratory at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are named after women pioneers in