In this paper we propose a robotics framework for studying emergence and collective adaptation. We describe two sets of experiments, where a pool of heterogeneous Khepera robots, participate in adapting the collective behavior, without being aware of it but just in virtue of the design of their internal structure. The innovative aspect in our approach rests on a system integrating communication as an active and dynamic component in the adaptation, and not only as a static part of the robots interactions.

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[19] Wooldridge M., Mueller J. P., and Tambe M, “Intelligent Agents,” Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1037, Springer-Verlag, January 1996. Soraya Mostéfaoui is a PhD candidate in the Parallelism and Artificial Intelligence research group (PAI) at the Computer Science Department at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Her research interests include distributed computing on the web, ubiquitous computing, collective robotics, multi- agent simulations, and emergent behaviors. Soraya received an engineer degree in computer science from the National Institute of Computer Science, Algiers, Algeria in 1999, and a master degree in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne Switzerland in 2000. She is a member of the ACM.