Collective motion with direct and indirect communication

This chapter considers general principles of direct and indirect communication between the mobile robots acting in group and the phenomena led by different types of communication. It presents an example of simple communication protocol, which implements the Mobile Ad Hoc Networking principles for communication between toy Lego NXT robots, and slight modification of this protocol for asynchronous communication in PAN, which supports flocking and preserving the robot’s group. Indirect communication between mobile robots in the group implies that the robots change the environmental states and they act with respect to these changes. In the case of combined communication, the robots communicate both directly using certain protocol and indirectly via environmental changes. The chapter also presents two examples of the collective behavior of the mobile robots with indirect and combined communication. The first example addresses the pheromone robotic system by simulating collective motion of ants, and the second example considers the model of biosignaling.