Stigmergic, Diegetic Guidance of Swarm Construction

Abstract

No matter how autonomous a technical system is, in the end, the goals it is meant to serve are specified by humans. This also applies to systems implementing self-organized construction. In this paper, we present an approach to guide such systems by means of an accessible spatial user interface. We inferred its basic requirements from a previously published taxonomy on interactive self-organizing systems. We found solutions to these requirements that we could all realize based on the very simple idea to instruct all aspects of a swarm by means of spatially placed control points, innovating preceding virtual pheromone approaches. We implemented a very simple, yet effective model of a terrain-shaping swarm to test the guidance approach and to manually explore the generative space.