Effectiveness of tuning of pheromone trail lifetime in attraction of robot swarm

Abstract

We focus on swarm behavior of ants. They communicate with each other using pheromone. They forage food using pheromone trail to attract many ants to foods. They also realize adaptive foraging by adjusting the property of the pheromone trail according to changes in the environment. It is effective to apply the swarm behavioral mechanism to the robotics. We propose adjustment method of the trail duration time based on the food quantity. We obtained simulation and experimental results that the proposed adjustment of the trail duration time is effective.