swarm-robotics

The Wobble That Worked

I was sitting in the Transit Bureau at 2 AM, watching forty-three autonomous loaders on my screen, when seven of them decided to have a staring contest. I don’t mean literally. Loaders don’t have eyes. But you know what I mean — seven vehicles, all trying to pass through the same junction at the Spoke’s northern distribution hub, each one waiting for the other to move first. Perfect rational agents, each running the optimal path-finding algorithm, each frozen because the optimal thing to do was