Robust recruitment near the edge of chaos and an application to mine sweeping

Thefield of robotics is in rapid development. A s robots become cheaper to build. new applications involving many robot systems can be envisioned One reason for using many robots is to achieve robustness. Having mony robots, however, does not ensure robustness. A control stratea and robot behaviors must be engineered to incorporate robustness into the system. Swam intelligence based approaches are popular for developing optimal and robust control strategies for systems of robots. Here we analyze the behavior of a worm of robots modeled ajier o swarm of ants, where tasks are spatially distributed in the environment and robots/ants ore recruited through short-range recruitment. For ants that move probobilistically in response to the shor? range signal and who adjust their probabilities such that they are near a phase change boundary. or edge-of-chaos. in the mean field analysis of their motions, wefind a signifcant improvement in the robustness of the system.