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. 1 Introduction This paper describes work that applies the behavior-- based approach for autonomous agent control to generating ethologically--inspired adaptive foraging. In contrast to foraging methods explored by various researchers to date (see section 3 for an overview), we employ a territorial principle that implements a division of labor into exclusive spatial areas. First, we use fixed group sizes of two, three, and four robots to evaluate...