A Decentralized Ant Colony Foraging Model Using Only Stigmergic Communication

This paper addresses the problem of foraging by a coordinated team of robots. This coordination is achieved by markers deposited by robots. In this paper, we present a novel decentralized behavioral model for multi robot foraging named cooperative c-marking agent model. In such model, each robot makes a decision according to the affluence of resource locations, either to spread information on a large scale in order to attract more agents or the opposite. Simulation results show that the proposed model outperforms the well-known c-marking agent model. Keywords— Collaborative foraging; reactive coordination; digital pheromone; agent behavioral model; stigmergy.