Research on foraging behavior of swarm robotics inspired by biological trophallaxis

Abstract

To improve the overall performance of the multi-robot system,inspired by the biological trophallaxis which exists extensively in nature,a new mechanism is proposed for coordination of multi-robot system based on the basic behavior of the former robots.Since limited sense and local interaction are adopted,the system is built in a self-organization way.An internal state variable is used for every robot to reflect the working state and its estimation of the environments and other robots’state.The probability of whether to exchange targets with other robots and the direction of trophallaxis between two robots are judged by comparing the internal state variables.The new method is aimed to reduce the collision between robots and extra energy cost which is caused by movement of the loading robots.In addition,the speed and rate of targets collected are used to evaluate the efficiency of the new method.Finally,computer simulations are accomplished and the simulation results are analyzed.Compared with other coordination mechanisms,the effectiveness of the methods proposed is shown when executing search and collection task.