A Study of Territoriality: The Role of Critical Mass in Adaptive Task Division

Abstract

This work demonstrates the application of the behavior-based approach to generating ethologically-inspired adaptive foraging using a division of labor into exclusive spatial territories. First, we use fixed group sizes to evaluate and compare the performance of the two types of adaptive solutions. Second, using a collection of experimental robot data, we empirically derive and demonstrate the critical mass for most effective foraging in our domain, and show the decline of performance of the space division strategy with increased group size.