They can move in the four cardinal directions, picking up or dropping tokens along the way. The origin of the regrouping problem lies in the study of cooperation within mobile robotic agents, where the functioning of a whole group depends on the individual competence of each robot as well as their interactions. The advantage of such an approach in collective robotics is that it eliminates the need for a global positioning system or of a supervisor monitoring the stacks of tokens. An object can be located on a cell or carried by an agent. A simple control algorithm that can be used is as follows.
Agents move randomly from a cell to a connected one.
We would like to stress on the problem of implementing a MAS, such as the one described above, on a distributed architecture. The instantiation of a MAS is most of the time serial. T. Dagaeff, F. Chantemargue, and B. Hirsbrunner. Emergence-based Cooperation in a MultiAgent System . In such an experiment, the location of the stack containing the objects at the end of the run is the result of the agents interactions.