Efficient Multi-foraging in Swarm Robotics

In the multi-foraging task studied in this paper, a group of robots has to efficiently retrieve two different types of prey to a nest. Robots have to decide when they leave the nest to forage and which prey to retrieve. The goal of this study is to identify an efficient multi-foraging behaviour, where efficiency is defined as a function of the energy that is spent by the robots during exploration and gained when a prey is retrieved to the nest. We design and validate a mathematical model that is used to predict the optimal behaviour. We introduce a decision algorithm and use simulations to study its performance in a wide range of experimental situations with respect to the predictions of the mathematical model.

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