Can robots reliably aggregate without computation?
Impossibility of Self-Organized Aggregation without Computation
This paper investigates the feasibility of "self-organized aggregation" in multi-robot systems, specifically focusing on robots with extremely limited capabilities (no memory, communication, or complex computation). It disproves a prior claim that a simple controller can guarantee aggregation for any number of robots and introduces a new controller proven to work for two robots. Crucially, it proves that no such simple controller can guarantee aggregation for more than two robots.
For LLM-based multi-agent systems, this highlights the importance of computational capabilities and communication in achieving complex coordination tasks like aggregation. While LLMs can provide more sophisticated individual agent behavior, the paper suggests that even with "intelligent" agents, simple interaction rules alone may be insufficient for reliable multi-agent coordination in certain scenarios. This emphasizes the need for explicit communication mechanisms and potentially more complex coordination algorithms in LLM-based multi-agent applications.