Adaptive multi-robot bucket brigade foraging

Abstract

Bucket brigade foraging improves upon homogeneous forag-ing by reducing spatial interference between robots, which occurs when robots are forced to work in the same space, and must spend time avoiding one another instead of carrying out useful work. Bucket brigade foraging algorithms restrict the motion of each robot to at most some fixed distance from its starting location. We reproduce the performance of known bucket brigade foragers, and then present a new controller in which robots adapt the size of their foraging area in re-sponse to interference with other robots, improving overall performance. This approach also has the potential to cope with nonuniform resource distributions.