Explicit communication in designing efficient cooperative mobile robotic system

This paper presents the design of ant-inspired control strategies that mimic the ant colony foraging behavior. Inter-agent communication, in particular explicit communication is applied to create multiple cooperating mobile robots in order to accomplish the foraging task. Explicit communication can significantly multiply the capabilities and effectiveness of teams of robotic systems. However, the drawback is it introduces more interference among robots at the goal and home region in comparison to robotic system without the implementation of inter-agent communication. Thus, to investigate how well the explicit communication can be adopted in designing efficient cooperative mobile robotic system, experiments were carried out on the simulated robots. The efficiency of the strategies are measured in terms of three criteria: time, density of robots and interference.