An energy-aware algorithm for large scale foraging systems

Abstract

The foraging task is one of the canonical testbeds for cooperative robotics, in which a collection of coordinated robots have to find and transport one or more objects to one or more specific storage points. Swarm robotics has been widely considered in such situations, due to its strengths such asrobustness, simplicity and scalability. Typical multi-robot foraging systems currently consider tens to hundreds of agents. This paper presents a new algorithm called Energy-aware Cooperative Switching Algorithm for Foraging (EC-SAF) that manages thousands of robots. We investigate therefore the scalability of EC-SAF algorithm and the parameters that can affect energy efficiency overtime. Results indicate that EC-SAF is scalable and effective in reducing swarm energy consumption compared to an energy-aware version of the reference well-known c-marking algorithm (Ec-marking).