Experiment of imitating ant feeding behavior using Kilobot

Abstract

To establish an algorithm design method for swarm robotics is important task because technology of the swarm robotics is expected due to its robustness. Various mobile robots are also developed for swarm robotics. The algorithm to realize a certain swarm behavior depends on robot hardware, i.e. equipped sensors, driving motors, size of robot or presence of communication device. Therefore, a design guide or design architecture for making the algorithm is required under a certain hardware conditions. However, that is difficult task, and the guide or architecture has not established yet because swarm robotics is one of complex system. By the way, there are two typical thinking ways about swarm robotics. One is to find principle of emergence of swarm behavior, and the another is to apply robots to actual tasks. Our research focuses to the former, which is to make design guide for swarm robotics. Robots used in experiments are preferable as simple as possible to observe the emergence of swarm behavior clearly. Therefore, we adopt Kilobot as a robot hardware, which is known as a simple mobile robot. In this paper, an algorithm for imitating ant-feeding-behavior is proposed using Kilobot, and the algorithm is experimentally evaluated.