Task Allocation in Evolved Communicating Homogeneous Robots: The Importance of Being Different

Social animals have conquered the world thanks to their ability to team up in order to solve survival problems. From ants to human beings, animals show ability to cooperate, communicate and divide labour among individuals. Cooperation allows members of a group to solve problems that a single individual could not, or to speed up a solution by splitting a task in subparts. Biological and swarm robotics studies suggest that division of labour can be favoured by differences in local information, especially in clonal individuals. However, environmental information alone could not suffice despite a task requires a role differentiation to be solved. In order to overcome this problem, in this paper, we analyse and discuss the role of a communication system able to differentiate signals emitted among a group of homogeneous robots to foster the evolution of a successful role allocation strategy.

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