Motion Control of Dense Robot Colony Using Thermodynamics

In the last decades the theory of the complex dynamical systemshas come to maturation providing a lot of important results in the field ofmany applied sciences. Also robotics has taken advantages from this new approach in what the behavior-based paradigm is particularly suitable to devise specific sensing activity since sensors usually provide information about the environment in a form which depends on the physics of the interaction. It is not required to be immediately converted into some symbolic representation but, on the contrary, it can be maintained at some physical level as a metaphor of the events observed in the environment. The close connection between the motor schema with its companion perceptual schema seems suggesting the presence of a substratum which underlies both perception and action activities, driving the flow of information accordingly. In the paper we consider a colony of robots immersed in a well-specified thermodinamical substratum where enthalpy and heat flux are devised to go vern the diffusion/merging behavior of a swarm.