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Chapter 5 Collective Construction with Robot Swarms

Social insects build large, complex structures, which emerge through the collective actions of many simple agents acting with no centralized control or preplanning. These natural systems inspire the research topic of collective construction, in which the goal is to engineer artificial systems that build in a similar way, with swarms of simple robots producing desired structures. In this chapter I review work on the design and realization of such systems. Robots in these systems act independently, in unknown numbers and with no fixed timing, using only local information and no explicit communication; the system takes a high-level design as input, and is guaranteed to produce a structure matching that design, without requiring the details of the construction process to be specified. Stigmergy (indirect communication through manipulation of a shared environment) and convention (tacit agreement due to the use of a common set of rules shared by all robots) are useful principles for implicit coordination that make these collective behaviors possible. I outline current progress in this area and future directions.