Foraging behavior of interacting robots with virtual pheromone

In multi-robot system, communication is indispensable for effective cooperative working. In this system, direct communication by physical methods such as light, sound, radio wave is quite general. But in biological system, especially in the insect world, not only the physical but also the chemical communication methods can be observed. As the chemical methods have some unique properties, it is challenging to apply such a method to the cooperative multi-robot system. Unfortunately, to treat real chemical materials for the robots is not easy for now because of some technical difficulties. In this paper, we propose virtual pheromone system in which chemical signals are simulated with the graphics projected on the floor, and in which the robots decide their action depending on the color information of the graphics. We examined the performance of this system through the foraging task, which is one of the most popular tasks for multi-robot system and is generally observed in ant societies.