From Stigmergy to Affordance: The Mechanical Basis of Robot Motion Control

In the last decade, the development of multi robot systems has shown with growing evidence how a well-balanced deliberative-reactive coordination can provide a group of robots with an efficient and robust collective behavior. In this paper, we want to cover exhaustively this issue from the point of view of the single agent in the general model we have already presented as "roboticle framework". Starting from a pure mechanical interpretation of an autonomous robot motion we shall understand the notions of stigmergy and affordance by maintaining at the subsymbolic level all the relevant information useful to drive properly the robot while it participates to the collective action. Specifically, we shall focus on some interesting parameters through which the designer of the single robot governor's unit could be helped to trigger its individual behavior within a collective scenario.