On cooperative swarm foraging for simple, non explicitly connected, agents

Abstract

Nowadays there are several applications that use swarm robotics for solving research tasks and resource exploitation. Most of these applications are based on complex agents that require explicit communication between them. These systems are difficult to introduce in certain environments because of these features, where agents can not always communicate between them and where it would be necessary a large swarm. This paper presents a swarm system for a collective resource exploitation. The main features of the agents of this system are their simplicity and they do not communicate with each other in explicit way. A microscopic model that shows the individual performance of agents has been proposed, and a macroscopic model that describes the overall swarm system has been provided. Several tests that show the convergence of the swarm towards the best resource in an unknown environment have been analyzed.