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Self-Organised Task Allocation in a Group of Robots

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Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 6

Abstract

Robot foraging, a frequently used test application for collective robotics, consists in a group of robots retrieving a set of opportunely defined objects to a target location. A commonly observed experimental result is that the retrieving efficiency of the group of robots, measured for example as the number of units retrieved by a robot in a given time interval, tends to decrease with increasing group sizes. In this paper we describe a biology inspired method for tuning the number of foraging robots in order to improve the group efficiency. As a result of our experiments, in which robots use only locally available information and do not communicate with each other, we observe self-organised task allocation. This task allocation is effective in exploiting mechanical differences among the robots inducing specialisation in the robots activities.

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Labella, T.H., Dorigo, M., Deneubourg, JL. (2007). Self-Organised Task Allocation in a Group of Robots. In: Alami, R., Chatila, R., Asama, H. (eds) Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 6. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-35873-2_38

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-35873-2_38

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo

  • Print ISBN: 978-4-431-35869-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-4-431-35873-2

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