Cooperation in collective systems

Cooperative collective systems, such as social insects, display amazing behaviors that combine efficiency, flexibility, and robustness. This chapter on cooperation in collective systems illustrates a fundamental property of natural organisms which operate only occasionally in isolation. The chapter discusses the methods that can be used to synthesize colonies or swarms of cooperating agents and some of the key principles that characterize such types of system such as coordination, generalization, and self-organization. It focuses in particular on collective evolutionary robotics approaches in which swarm of robots are evolved for the ability to solve problems that require cooperation.