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Copyright © 2014 Muaz A. Niazi. Muaz A. Niazi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The body structure of snakes is composed of numerous natural components thereby making it resilient, flexible, adaptive, and dynamic. In contrast, current computer animations as well as physical implementations of snake-like autonomous structures are typically designed to use either a single or a relatively smaller number of components. As a result, not only these artificial structures are constrained by the dimensions of the constituent components but often also require relatively more computationally intensive algorithms to model and animate. Still, these animations often lack life-like resilience and adaptation. This paper presents a solution to the problem of modeling snake-like structures by proposing an agent-based, self-organizing algorithm resulting in an emergent and surprisingly resilient dynamic structure involving a minimal of interagent communication. Extensive simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness as well as resilience of the proposed approach. The ideas originating from the proposed algorithm can not only be used for developing self-organizing animations but can also have practical applications such as in the form of complex, autonomous, evolvable robots with self-organizing, mobile components with minimal individual computational capabilities. The work also demonstrates the utility of exploratory agent-based modeling (EABM) in the engineering of artificial life-like complex adaptive systems.

Details

Title
Emergence of a Snake-Like Structure in Mobile Distributed Agents: An Exploratory Agent-Based Modeling Approach
Author
Niazi, Muaz A
Publication year
2014
Publication date
2014
Publisher
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
ISSN
23566140
e-ISSN
1537744X
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1561748815
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 Muaz A. Niazi. Muaz A. Niazi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.