Every Thursday, we are going to showcase a staff and student research from the past few years. This week we revisit a project described by Marco Klingmann (Msc Cognitive Computing) in 2009.

This is a simulation of agents doing “rock gathering on mars”. The agents have to find and collect rocks in a bounded environment and carry them to the mother-ship. The environment consists in collectable rocks (samples) and immovable obstacles. Each agent can only carry one rock at the time. Samples are clustered in certain spots.

The agents do not know the location of obstacles and samples in advance.‌The simulation scenario and agent behaviour rules were adapted from Steels, L. (1991). “Cooperation between distributed agents through self-organisation”.

The agents are based on subsumption architecture (cf. Brooks, R.1986. “A robust layered control system for a mobile robot”.)

Marco Klingmann is now an interaction designer and app developer working in Switzerland. Follow him on Twitter