For Immediate Release
December 9, 2003

Researchers Discuss Findings from Social Insects Studies at December 16-17 Workshop

Georgia Tech researchers will make several presentations at the Second International Workshop on the Mathematics and Algorithms of Social Insects on Dec. 16-17 at Georgia Tech. The presentations will be published in the spring 2004 issue of the journal Adaptive Behavior.

• Roboticist Ronald Arkin, a Georgia Tech professor of computing, will give one of the three keynote addresses. Arkin has studied biologically inspired robotic behavior for more than 15 years. He will present an overview of research in this field, including amphibian models of detour behavior, visuomotor control systems of the praying mantis and canine-type behavior in Sony’s AIBO entertainment robot. Arkin and his colleagues have incorporated many of the underlying organizational principles from these research projects into their robotic team design for the U.S. military.
  
  
• Carl Anderson, a former visiting assistant professor at the Georgia Tech School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, will present a paper explaining how in many teams, small changes in individual-level rules may lead to very large changes at the group level. He will describe the phenomenon in the context of the “aggressor-defender game,” a simple participative game in which each player randomly selects two others (A and B) from the group. In the aggressor game, everyone tries to position themselves so that A is always between themselves and B. In the defender game, everyone tries to position themselves between A and B. Despite these simple rules and the seemingly small difference between them, the two games exhibit very different dynamics. The aggressor game produces a highly dynamic group that rapidly expands over time, while the defender game quickly collapses to a tight knot. For an online demonstration, see (www.icosystem.com/game.htm). Anderson is now a scientist at Icosystem Corporation in Cambridge, Mass.
  
  
  
• Assistant Professor of Computing Tucker Balch and graduate student Patrick Ulam will explain how individual members of a multi-robot team may allocate themselves into specialist and generalist niches in a multi-foraging task where a cost may exist for generalist strategies. Through the use of reinforcement learning, the researchers have shown that the robots can divide the task to effectively complete it -- much as animals do when they maximize certain foraging behaviors (e.g., caloric intake), while minimizing others (e.g., predatory risk and energy expenditure), to increase reproductive fitness. In this research, robots divide the work without prior knowledge of the environment and without direct communication between team members.
  
  
  Other Georgia Tech researchers will give poster presentations at the meeting. For more information on the workshop, see (www.insects.gatech.edu).

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TECHNICAL CONTACT: Tucker Balch (404-385-2861); E-mail: (tucker@cc.gatech.edu).

WRITER: Jane Sanders