A new complete heuristic approach for ant rendezvous problem

Ant meeting problem is a distributed problem that its purpose is to find an efficient path for ants to meet each other. Actually, ant robots suffer from the low memory and their restricted computational power. They communicate with their environment by leaving some symptoms like pheromones in their surroundings. In the problem of ants meeting, the ants should reach together in order to cooperate in an intelligent algorithm. In the common type of this problem, they start to search the environment without any knowledge about their locations, directions, obstacles and any other information. They can just leave some signs on the environment which shows their tracks. These marks are the only way of communication between ants. Also, these marks show the information about the ant which has passed the track, and every ant knows whose mark is that. In this paper, a new heuristic approach is proposed for the distributed ants meeting problem based on A* algorithm which guaranties the ants meeting in a finite time. Experimental results show that the presented algorithm is more efficient than previous ones.