Trophallaxis among swarm-robots: A biologically inspired strategy for swarm robotics

Abstract

This article presents a bio-inspired communication strategy for large-scale robot swarms. The strategy is based on robot-to-robot interactions without any central communication unit. Thus, the emerging swarm regulates itself in a purely self-organized way. The strategy is biologically inspired by the trophallactic behavior performed by social insects. The experiments shown in this article are performed with a simulation environment that was developed to model the properties of a specific type of swarm robot. We investigated the suggested communication strategy in several arena scenarios and studied the properties of some emergent collective decisions made by the robots