Abstract : In this work we study indirect robots' perception and co- operation by enabling a way of communication through the environ- ment. It consists in paving the oor with communicating tiles, each one beeing connected to its neighbors and implementing an autonomous process. This regular network constitutes a grid world in which robots can read and write information. So bio-inspired models using marking of the environment, such as digital pheromones, can be implemented with real robots. We present experimental results showing the interest of the approach in multi-robot problems, by using message diusion and pheromone evaporation processes.