Collaborative foraging using beacons

A classic example of multiagent coordination in a shared environment involves the use of pheromone deposits as a communication mechanism. Due to physical limitations in deploying actual pheromones, we propose a sparse representation of the pheromones using movable beacons. There is no communication between the beacons to propagate pheromones; instead, robots make movement and update decisions based entirely on local pheromone values. Robots deploy the beacons throughout the environment, and subsequently move them and update them using a variation of value iteration. Simulation results show that our approach is effective at finding good trails, locally improving them, and adapting to dynamic changes in the environments. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2 [Distributed Artificial Intelligence]: Multiagent Systems General Terms Algorithms Keywords Beacon, Ant, Pheromone

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Brian Hrolenok, Sean Luke, Keith Sullivan, Christopher Vo
• Keywords: ATAL 2010, Intelligent Agents, Local Pheromone Values, Pheromone, Pheromone Deposits