Recruitment Near Worksites Facilitates Robustness of Foraging E-Puck Swarms to Global Positioning Noise

Abstract

We compare the ability of two different robot controllers for collective foraging to cope with noise in robot global positioning data and show how recruitment, in the form of broadcast messages near worksites, can make swarms more robust. Swarms of five e-puck robots are used in a semi-virtual environment, facilitated by the VICON positioning system. This setup allows us to control the amount of noise in the robot positioning data and to generate pseudo-random environments, while retaining important physical aspects of the experiment. The effect of inherent noise in the robot infra-red sensors, used for obstacle avoidance, is noted and the importance of modelling such noise in agent-based simulations is highlighted.