A Survey of Self-Awareness and Its Application in Computing Systems <s> D. Systems with Emergent Self-Awareness <s> The swarm intelligence paradigm has proven to have very interesting properties such as robustness, flexibility and ability to solve complex problems exploiting parallelism and self-organization. Several robotics implementations of this paradigm confirm that these properties can be exploited for the control of a population of physically independent mobile robots. ::: ::: The work presented here introduces a new robotic concept called swarm-bot in which the collective interaction exploited by the swarm intelligence mechanism goes beyond the control layer and is extended to the physical level. This implies the addition of new mechanical functionalities on the single robot, together with new electronics and software to manage it. These new functionalities, even if not directly related to mobility and navigation, allow to address complex mobile robotics problems, such as extreme all-terrain exploration. ::: ::: The work shows also how this new concept is investigated using a simulation tool (swarmbot3d) specifically developed for quickly designing and evaluating new control algorithms. Experimental work shows how the simulated detailed representation of one s-bot has been calibrated to match the behaviour of the real robot. <s> BIB001 </s> A Survey of Self-Awareness and Its Application in Computing Systems <s> D. Systems with Emergent Self-Awareness <s> How can self-awareness emerge in a distributed system with no central control? How can such awareness feed back in a decentralized way to control the system’s behavior? Many people have written about how selfawareness might come about in the brain. In this paper, I examine mechanisms for self-awareness and control in two other decentralized biological systems: the immune system and ant colonies. I then attempt to isolate some principles common to both systems. Finally, I discuss ways in which these mechanisms can serve as inspiration for the design of artificial intelligence systems with sophisticated abilities for distributed self-awareness and <s> BIB002
Self-awareness research is not limited to an entity or system in itself being able to monitor and reason about itself, but also describes emergent phenomena BIB002 . In natural systems like ant colonies and the immune system, the awareness of the global state is distributed across the elementary units that make up the system (e.g. ants and their trails) and is statistical in nature. This helps the system stay robust at the global level in the face of disturbances. In essence, the system as a whole is aware enough of itself to understand when the globally stable state gets disturbed, and engages the elementary units to collect information locally, which builds up in a statistical fashion, helping the elementary units use this statistical information to get the system back into the globally stable state. It has been proposed BIB002 that such systems can provide guidelines for designing artificial intelligence systems with decentralised architectures, for example robotic swarms, which exhibit apparent self-awareness. One example of where such a system has been developed is within the SWARM-BOTS project BIB001 . One of the objectives of the SWARM-BOTS project was the design and implementation of a novel mobile robot, called an s-bot. While s-bots' individual capabilities within an environment are physically limited (much like individual insects in the natural world), through local communication they are able to self-assemble  into larger structures, known as swarmbots, which are capable of achieving goals not reachable by individual s-bots. Examples of such goals might include navigation over challenging terrain or the transportation of large objects; in all cases, these tasks cannot be solved without the coordinated movements of individual s-bots. Other research challenges within the area of selfassembly, or structural self-organisation, include better understanding how system structures, rather than individual behaviours, can be adapted over time with respect to the system's distributed sense of self-concept  .