Randomized Robot Trophallaxis: From concept to implementation

Trophallaxis is a natural phenomenon, biologically observed from social insects or vertebrate animals, to exchange food between colony members. This paper describes a new robotic concept, "Randomized Robot Trophallaxis", based on a group of autonomous mobile robots with capabilities of self-refueling energy and self-sharing energy. We firstly clarify the concept "Randomized Robot Trophallaxis" by given examples of some natural animal societies. We continuously put emphases on mechatronics implementation of the trophallactic robots. Simulation results are described to point out considerable advantages of trophallactic features when deploying multiple mobile robots latter. The paper is ended with discussion on the concept as well as future vision.