Biologically motivated shape optimization of foraging fronts

Abstract

Social animals often form a predator front to charge through an aggregation of prey. It is observed that the nature of the feeding strategy dictates the geometric shape of these charging fronts. Inspired by this observation, we model foraging multi-robot fronts as a curve moving through a prey density. We optimize the shape of the curve using variational arguments and simulate the results to illustrate the operation of the proposed curve optimization algorithm.