From solitary animals to social robots.

The interdisciplinary workshop is focused on self-organized groups of animals and robots. Intelligent collective behaviours can emerge from the social interaction of individuals with minimal capacities. The aim of the workshop is to discuss how these societies process information and solve problems, while keeping some parsimony at the level of the individual decision rules. The collective decisions are produced using a small set of rules of thumb that require only limited cognitive ability and contrast to the often suggested complexity of solitary individuals. These societies can be modelled as complex systems with non-linear dynamics. The theoretical tools to analyze the dynamics of these systems and the methodology making the link between the algorithms governing the individual behaviour and the global dynamics will be discussed.

The workshop is organized by the European project LEURRE. Its main objective is to show that it is possible to trigger the emergence of new global patterns by adding robots with specific behaviours to an animal society. It means that special attention will be given to the scientific and technological bases for the development of systems mixing natural and artificial agents.