Reactive food gathering. CLIMA VI contest submission

This short paper describes the design and development of a simple agent system aimed at addressing the food gathering problem set for the 2005 CLIMA contest. Our system is implemented as a collection of reactive agents which dynamically switch between a number of behaviours depending on interaction with their environment. Our agents maintain no internal representation of their environment and operate purely in response to their immediate surroundings. The agents collectively map the environment co-operating indirectly via environmental markers and they use these markers to assist them in locating the depot when they discover food. The required behaviour emerges from the interaction between agents and the marked environment. The application can be downloaded from: http://219.1.164.219/∼robert/pwBlog/wp-content/CLIMAbuild.zip