Towards an engineering science of robot foraging

Abstract

Foraging is a benchmark problem in robotics - especially for distributed autonomous robotic systems. The systematic study of robot foraging is important for several reasons: firstly, because foraging is a metaphor for the broad class of problems integrating robotic exploration, navigation and object identification, manipulation and transport; secondly, in multi-robot systems foraging is a canonical problem for the study of robot-robot cooperation; and thirdly, many and diverse actual or potential real-world applications for robotics are instances of foraging robots, for example, for cleaning, harvesting, search and rescue, landmine clearance or planetary astrobiology. This paper sets out a theoretical framework, structured upon an abstract model and taxonomy of robot foraging. A framework which, it is hoped, might provide the basis of a principled approach to the engineering of future real-world robot foraging systems.