Social Inhibition Manages Division of Labour in Artificial Swarm Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a novel and bio-inspired algorithm for distributed division of labour in swarms of artificial agents (e.g., autonomous underwater vehicles). The algorithm is inspired by division of labour via local interactions in social insects. The algorithm is successfully implemented in virtual agents and simulated robot swarms and demonstrates a high adaptivity in response to changes in the workforce and task demands in the swarm level as well as a high specialization to tasks in the agents level.