Self-Organised Task Allocation in a Group of Robots

Abstract

Robot foraging, a frequently used test application for collective robotics, consists in a group of robots retrieving a set of opportunely defined objects to a target location. A commonly observed experimental result is that the retrieving efficiency of the group of robots, measured for example as the number of units retrieved by a robot in a given time interval, tends to decrease with increasing group sizes. In this paper we describe a biology inspired method for tuning the number of foraging robots in order to improve the group efficiency. As a result of our experiments, in which robots use only locally available information and do not communicate with each other, we observe self-organised task allocation. This task allocation is effective in exploiting mechanical differences among the robots inducing specialisation in the robots activities.