Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents an approach to describing group behavior using simple local interactions among individuals. We propose that for a given domain a set of basic interactions can be defined which describes a large variety of group behaviors. The methodology we present allows for simplified qualitative analysis of group behavior through the use of shared goals, kin recognition, and minimal communication. W e also demonstrate h o w these basic interactions can be simply combined into more complex compound group behaviors. To validate our approach we implemented an array of basic group behaviors in the domain of spatial interactions among homogeneous agents. We describe some of the experimental results from two distinct domains: a software environment, and a collection of 20 mobile robots. We also describe a compound behavior involving a combination of the basic interactions. Finally, we compare the performance of homogeneous groups to those of dominance hierarchies on the same set of basic behaviors.