Abstract
A multi-robot system which is not controlled by any type of global controller and whose global behavior is emerged from the local interactions among robots or among robots and their environment is often called a swarm robotics system (SRS). While a number of researchers are interested in coordinating emergent behavior, only a few research projects deal with understanding and analyzing the collective behavior. To the best of our knowledge, no generally useful methods have been proposed in the case when robots have their physical bodies and as a result of that the congestion as well as collisions among robots occur in the simulated environment. In this paper, a novel method of analyzing the collective behavior incorporating the concept of behavioral sequence based on technique in ethology is proposed. In order to prove the potential power of the proposed method, a series of computer simulations of cooperative package-pushing problems is conducted to extract some features of collective behavior.
