A distributed foraging algorithm based on artificial potential field

Simple collections of agents that perform collectively and use distributed control algorithms constitute the interests of swarm robotics. A key issue to improve system performances is to effectively coordinate the team of agents. We present in this paper a multi-agent foraging algorithm called Cooperative-Color Marking Foraging Agents (C-CMFA). It uses the coordination rules of the S-MASA (Stigmergic Multi-Ant Search Area) algorithm to (i) speed up the search process and (ii) allow agents to build an optimal Artificial Potential Field (APF) simultaneously while exploring. To benefit from multiple robots, we add one cooperation rule in the algorithm to attract a large number of agents to the found food. This algorithm constitutes a distributed and synchronous version of the c-marking algorithm. Simulation results in comparison with the c-marking one show the superiority of C-CMFA in different environment configurations.