Collective Robot Sex on Dynamic Resource Landscapes

We present a community of robots (``Jeeps''), which move over a resourc landscape consisting of a large light-emitting diode (LED) light board whose local RGB intensity represents fitness, the local intensity can change due to robot local presence, making the landscape dynamic. Each Jeep has a basic digital genotype that carries the response (phenotype) to a given local fitness value, down-ward firing RGB sensors to measure local intensity and RGB color, and side-firing sensors and LEDs to communicate with neighboring Jeeps and engage in gene exchange (robot sex) with neighboring Jeeps. The Jeeps move in response to the current local fitness gradient given by the gradient in color intensity of their position on the light board. The jeeps ``genes’’ mutate at a rate inversely proportional to the color intensity at their position, breed genomes, and consume resources. This robot community has great generality which spans the space of many-body soft-matter physics, evolutionary biology and multi-cell disease states. We show robots on the dynamic landscape exhibit the self-organization of a collective, distributed intelligent complexity