Self-Organised Task Allocation in a Group of Robots
Labella Thomas Halva, Dorigo Marco, Deneubourg Jean-Louis

Abstract:

Robot foraging, a frequently used test application for collective robotics, consists in a group of robots retrieving a set of opportunely de ned objects to a target location. A commonly observed experimental result is that the retrieving e ciency 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 e ciency. 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 e ective in exploiting mechanical di erences among the robots inducing specialisation in the robots activities.