Hierarchical Organization of Robots: A Social Simulation Study

this paper, we motivate and report simulation experiments within a canonical task environment to assess the benefits from introducing richer organizational structures to control essentially simple but fallible robot-type agents. The sort of situation we have in mind would be a team of robots cleaning the floor and at the same time monitoring inside a museum during the night (such robots, at least as single systems, exist). Each of them can sense and act in a variety of ways and work independently. Each robot has a map of the museum but is "responsible" for a particular area,