Trophallaxis with predetermined energy threshold for enhanced performance in swarms of scavenger robots

摘要

We present an agent-based simulation of a group of robots that source their energy from their surrounding environment. The robots forage their energy from localised sources, distributed in their surrounding environment and share energy with each other through “trophallaxis”. We investigate the effect of energy loss during energy transfer by considering two model configurations. In the first configuration, neighbouring pairs of robots shared the sum of their combined energy equally, at each time-step, without considering the energy levels of each robot. In contrast, in the second configuration, only donor and recipient robots averaged their energy. The roles of donor and recipient were defined by predetermined energy thresholds. Levy walk behaviour was employed to improve foraging ability. The results show that bio-inspired trophallaxis and Levy walk enhances the performance of the groups of scavenger robots. Our results indicate that trophallaxis is particularly effective considering energy loss during energy transfer. This suggests us the possibility to apply the trophallaxis models to the real robot systems where energy loss occurs during energy transfer.