Nature-inspired swarm robotics algorithms for prioritized foraging

Abstract

This paper introduces the problem of prioritized foraging. The performance of a naϊve foraging algorithm and a desert ant foraging algorithm is evaluated on the prioritized foraging problem. The evaluation is used to motivate the creation of a novel honey bee based foraging algorithm. The performance and adaptability to different environments is evaluated for all algorithms. This paper concludes that a relationship exists between the performance of the existing foraging algorithms and the initial ratio of agents configured to forage prioritized items. The honey bee algorithm was shown to perform well across all configurations.