Cooperative Cleaners: A Study in Ant Robotics

Abstract. In the world of living creatures, "simple minded" animals often cooperate to achieve common goals with amazing performance. One can consider this idea in the context of robotics, and suggest models for programming goaloriented behavior into the members of a group of simple robots lacking global supervision. This can be done by controlling the local interactions between the robot agents, to have them jointly carry out a given mission. As a test case we analyze the problem of many simple robots cooperating to clean the dirty floor of a non-convex region in Z2 , using the dirt on the floor as the main means of inter-robot communication.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: IJRR
• Authors: Israel A. Wagner, Yaniv Altshuler, Vladimir Yanovski, Alfred M. Bruckstein
• Keywords: Amazing Performance, IJRR 2008, Living Creatures, Simple Robots